President Trump on Thursday attacked a law signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, calling the effort “racist” and “totally unconstitutional” and threatening to end it “immediately.”
Mr. Trump’s statement was one of the starkest examples yet of his slash-and-burn approach to dismantling the legacy of his immediate predecessor in this term in office. The Digital Equity Act, a little-known effort to improve high-speed internet access in communities with poor access, was tucked into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden signed into law early in his presidency.
The act was written to help many different groups, including veterans, older people and disabled and rural communities. But Mr. Trump, using the incendiary language that has been a trademark of his political career, denounced the law on Thursday for also seeking to improve internet access for ethnic and racial minorities, raging in a social media post that it amounted to providing “woke handouts based on race.”
In reality, the law barely mentions race at all, only stating that racial minorities could be covered by the program while including a nondiscrimination clause that says that individuals could not be excluded from the program “on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability” — language taken from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Digital Equity Act, drafted by Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, provides $60 million in grants to states and territories to help them come up with plans to make internet access more equal, as well as $2.5 billion in grants to help put those plans into effect. Some of that funding has already been disbursed to states with approved plans — including red, rural states like Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa and Kansas. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding were approved by the Biden administration in the weeks before Mr. Trump took office, but have not yet been distributed.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump had carried out his threat to end the grants, which were appropriated through Congress. The agencies that oversee the internet initiative, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Department of Commerce, did not immediately to requests for comment.
The cancellation of grants to states would almost certainly be challenged in the courts, where the Trump administration has had some success in blocking, at least temporarily, challenges to its suspension of grants related to equity and diversity programs. However, in late March, the administration failed to ward off a block on its sweeping freeze of federal funds to states.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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