Sen. Cruz Leads GOP Effort to Block FCC’s Wi-Fi Hotspots Order

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2025 – Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was joined by  12 other committee Republican senators Monday to challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s Wi-Fi Hotspot Order instated under the Biden Administration.

Taking down the rule by using the Congressional Review Act would “nullify a partisan FCC order that violates federal law, creates major risks for kids’ online safety, harms parental rights, and will increase taxes on working families,” a Committee press release said.

If the CRA reaches the Senate floor, it can’t be stopped by a filibuster.

The rule in question, the FCC’s Wi-Fi Hotspot Order, expanded the E-Rate program funded by the Universal Service Fund to subsidize hotspot usage  off-campus by schoolchildren and library patrons.

According to the Republican senators, the rule gave children greater, unsupervised access to the internet and stripped parents of control over their children’s web activities.

“Every parent of a young child or teenager either worries about, or knows first-hand, the real dangers of the internet. The government shouldn’t be complicit in harming students or impeding parents’ ability to decide what their kids see by subsidizing unsupervised access to inappropriate content,” Cruz said.

Former FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said her Wi-Fi hotspots rules were designed to close the homework – something seen during the pandemic when students accessed the internet in the parking lot of fast-food restaurants.

The senators argued that shifting device and internet control from parents to schools heightened the “risk of censoring kids’ exposure to conservative viewpoints.”

Cruz and the resolution’s co-sponsors viewed the Wi-Fi Hotspot Order as a blatant overreach of the FCC’s power and an unnecessary increase to the already high 36.3% contribution factor that collect revenue for USF

“The FCC’s order imposes no overall limit on the amount of federal dollars that can be expended on the hotspots, lacks mean-testing to target children who may not have internet at home, and allows for duplication of service in areas where the federal government is already subsidizing broadband,” the release emphasized.

Cruz and many of the same Republicans that joined him today, such as Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn, and Tedd Budd, R-N.C., pushed back against a similar E-Rate expansion in April 2024, when the FCC authorized the use of USF money to subsidize Wi-Fi on school buses. That FCC order is awating a ruling by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.