B (67:16)
If you can accuse someone of fraud, literally anything is possible. You can, you can, you can invade their cities and towns. You can do whatever you want, even as you. And in fact, the principal of the Trump administration, Donald Trump himself does frauds. I don't want to say about this. I would point out, for example, that the Trump phone is itself a fraud that we cover regularly. But the Trump administration, if we can find fraud. Woo. Have we. Have we. Are we dining out tonight, boys? So Brandon Carr holds an entire hearing about something called the Lifeline program, which I am guessing most French cast listeners don't pay attention to, don't think about, but which is very, very important to lots of people in this country. It is the program that subsidizes phone and broadband bills. So if you are poor, you don't have the means. You need to be connected to participate, inside, you need to be connected. The Lifeline program is there for you. And it's basically just a subsidy program. And it's one of those things that works like it exists up until. Brendan, every FCC chairman talks about protecting it, about funding it. There's some debates on the margins over where the money should come from. There's thing called the Universal Service Fund. It's all this stuff, but no one thinks we shouldn't have it. No one thinks it's bad. Except for Brendan, I was gonna say, who showed up this week and decided that the Lifeline program is full of fraud. And he put out a notice of proposed rulemaking where he claims the FCC's Office of Inspector General found that the states that don't that run their own verification for being eligible for Lifeline are doing massive fraud and that California is doing all the fraud, 81% of the fraud. And they've taken like $5 million in fraud, which in the grand scheme of billion dollar government programs is nothing. But that's enough fraud for you to punish California, which notably is a blue state. So, Brendan, I'll just read the quote. A recent inspector general advisory shows Lifeline providers received nearly $5 million in federal providers to provide phone Internet services to more than 116,000 dead people in the three opt out states. Of that 80% of the scams took place in California alone. That type of waste, fraud and abuse is completely unacceptable. This is Brandon on his high horse. California notably responds to this and they say, no, you're just doing the same dumb thing Elon did, which is that you're over indexing on the amount of time between someone dying and someone being taken off the program. Right. So there's just a lag time. California is a big state, a lot of people. There's just a lag time in our reporting between someone dying, us being told they're dead and then being removed from the program. Carr's response to this is saying, I'm going through this anyway. I'm radically changing the eligibility rules for the Lifeline program to make it harder to be in it, which is a way of punishing poor people, punishing minorities. We know this is true and is of course the whole goal, which is always the goal. And so you have just the one poor Democratic commissioner remaining on the fcc, Anna Gomez, in her quote. By proposing to use the same cruel and punitive eligibility standards recently imposed for Medicaid coverage, the FCC risks excluding large numbers of eligible households from Lifeline, including seniors, people with disabilities, rural residents and tribal communities that millions rely on to stay connected to work, school, healthcare and emergency services. There are ways to fix this. You can think that Lifeline is, is full of fraud. You, you can, that's fine. And like I said, there are lots of debates on how to fund Lifeline and whatever you have to know Lifeline is important. You have to care about the people that need broadband to participate in society. And your goal has to be those people that we think are alive and rightfully taking part in this program are getting the service they need. And we're going to deal with the fraud. Not California is full of waste, fraud and abuse. And I'm going to doge it up and I'm going to make it so that almost no one can get this because I don't like Gavin Newsom, which is 100% what Brannon Carr is doing and inside doing. I think he's punishing people who desperately need connectivity. I also think the entire point of the FCC should be to get this country connected. And they've utterly failed across every administration, they've utterly failed at this. So here we are. Brandon Carr is a dummy. He is going to cut lots of poor people, offer them Internet service and phone service in the Name of punishing Gavin Newsom. I think that is outrageous. I think it's as morally outrageous as all this First Amendment stuff. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show, defend your callous and, quite frankly, un American behavior, and I'll yell at you a bunch. I think that'll be fun. I think that'll be a good use of my free speech and a good use of your time as a government servant. You can. Come on, you can ping me, people can tweet at you. I know you listen to the show, but you still haven't shown up. Tier of the first cast. That's it. That's been. Brendan Carr is dummy. America's favorite podcast.
