Kyla Williams Tate is the Director of Digital Equity for Cook County Government in the Office of the President. The county submitted applications to both the DEA Competitive and Capacity grant programs. Colin Rhinesmith is an associate professor and director of the Digital Equity Action Research (DEAR) Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Last May, the Trump Administration canceled the Digital Equity Act (DEA) with a single social media post, claiming it was unconstitutional. The following day, termination notices went out to every grantee across the country. The $2.75 billion that Congress had approved to help all 50 states and US territories close the digital divide was gone.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), which had already been awarded competitive grant funds and was weeks away from launching digital navigator services for 30,000 people across 11 states, filed a federal lawsuit in October 2025 arguing the cancellation was unconstitutional. Some of its 1,900-plus affiliates had to scrap projects, make hard staffing decisions, or shut their doors entirely. This month, NDIA is leading a national Month of Action to mark the anniversary and demand restoration of the program.

The case for restoration is urgent. To make it complete, we need to go beyond the dollars to what they were meant to make possible. The Digital Equity Act was not just a funding program. It was a soil amendment. It was meant to enrich the conditions that determine whether any investment in digital equity actually takes root.

What healthy ecosystems require

The digital divide is not a new problem. For years, Pew Research Center data has shown that 43% of adults making less than $30,000 annually lack home broadband, compared with near-universal access among households earning $100,000 or more. A December 2025 report from the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society found that progress made between 2019 and 2021 has since been erased and that an income-constrained saturation pattern is hardening into what Benton calls the “new normal” of the digital divide.

Every state digital equity plan made clear that closing the digital divide requires addressing affordability, availability, skills, and trust simultaneously. Treating these as competing priorities rather than interdependent ones is precisely why progress has stalled for decades. The Digital Equity Act understood that.

It was designed to address both infrastructure and conditions. The Competitive Grant Program would have funded the Digital Navigators who meet people where they are, in public libraries, community centers, and neighborhood organizations, helping residents build the skills, confidence, and trust to participate in digital life. The Capacity Grant Program would have funded what makes those services sustainable: broadband planning, workforce development, cross-sector coalitions, and the infrastructure of shared community practice.

Recent research has found that, much like ecosystem health in the natural world, digital equity ecosystems depend on three conditions: energy, diversity, and resilience. In natural ecosystems, solar energy is one of the primary sources of fuel. In digital equity ecosystems, “people power” can be found in the form of Digital Navigators and the digital equity “champions” and network “weavers” who lead digital equity coalitions.

Ecology tells us that diversity is essential to ensure overall ecosystem health. Digital equity coalition members in San Antonio, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles County, and Essex County, Massachusetts, all described the importance of having a diversity of organizations and participants from a wide variety of fields and backgrounds. That diversity creates the collaborative capacity communities need to advance digital equity.

Resilience in ecology is defined as the ability to adapt to external forces. Threats to healthy digital equity ecosystems appear in three forms: competition, such as the de-prioritization of digital equity funding; disturbance, such as the end of the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program; and stress, such as a lack of transparency among internet service providers or advocacy fatigue among coalition members.

Healthy digital equity ecosystems need adequate funding to support these three conditions – energy, diversity, and resilience – which are found in successful coalition efforts to address the root causes of the digital divide.

Roots that were cut

In Cook County, Illinois, that landscape is visible and specific where they applied for both the competitive and capacity grants. Together, those applications were not a generic service delivery plan. They were a blueprint for a regional ecosystem, designed to bring urban, suburban, and rural-adjacent communities into a shared infrastructure of digital support for the first time, serving residents in the county’s lowest-scoring communities across a county of more than five million people. Cross-sector partners were aligned, plans were developed, and communities were prepared.

When the funding was canceled, that coalition dispersed and some partners are no longer in the ecosystem. Some priorities found other funding sources, but that meant other work went unfunded in its place. A regional study intended to map broadband gaps across jurisdictional lines was never conducted. A countywide helpline that would have connected residents to digital resources through an existing health and social services platform still does not exist.

That is what ecosystem damage looks like in practice: not always a total collapse, but a quiet displacement of what gets to happen and what doesn’t.

A disappearing trail

What rarely gets discussed in the aftermath of the DEA cancellation is the scale of thinking it required and enabled. The Act empowered states and territories not only to assess their own digital equity needs but to consider how pathways of connectivity and digital confidence can develop across borders. That kind of regional thinking is both complex and ambitious. It acknowledges that people do not stay within rigid jurisdictional lines. Housing costs, job opportunities, and family ties regularly move people across county and state boundaries.

Cook County framed its digital equity work to include not just its neighboring counties but neighboring states, because the populations it serves move fluidly across those lines.

With the DEA gone, that cross-border ecosystem thinking has no federal home. The one remaining broadband program that might have complemented its efforts, the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program (BEAD), is itself at risk. BEAD was always a different kind of investment, focused on infrastructure rather than the human connections the DEA was designed to build.

The program’s numerous delays in releasing funds to states are jeopardizing the completion of broadband projects. Illinois and California are still awaiting federal approval for their BEAD Final Proposals. Illinois Governor Pritzker wrote directly to Commerce Secretary Lutnick in May 2026, warning that service providers with 232 construction projects ready to launch are being stalled, that costs are rising, and that the delay is breaking a promise to get Americans connected. That is the deeper risk of BEAD’s delay: not just slower connectivity, but providers and communities that give up on the path entirely.

Below the surface

What the data cannot fully capture, and what technology policy most often misses, is the human layer, or what the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society refers to as the “human infrastructure of broadband.” This human layer is the set of conditions that determine whether a person engages with digital tools at all. It is not about bandwidth or device availability. It is about whether the digital world feels safe, relevant, and accessible to someone who has been historically excluded from it.

Across Illinois, from Chicago’s south and west sides to rural communities downstate, the barriers look different on the surface but share the same roots. Residents navigate fear of being scammed, shame about skills they feel they should already have, and deep distrust of institutions that have made promises before and not kept them. Digital navigators who work in libraries, community centers, and health organizations in these communities understand that handing someone a device or a hotspot does not address any of that. The experience of engaging with technology has to feel like it was designed for the person in front of you, not despite them.

Further, getting online and staying online are two very different things. Affordability continues to be a challenge even for households that have gained access, making it clear that the human layer can provide ongoing challenges that require sustained investment in people, relationships, and trust. That is exactly what the Digital Equity Act was designed to fund. And it is exactly what cannot be rebuilt quickly once the investment disappears.

Tending the garden

Healthy ecosystems require sustained investment. Without it, progress slows while the surrounding environment continues to change rapidly. One year later, the argument for restoring the Digital Equity Act is not primarily a financial one. It is an ecological one. Digital equity is not a pipeline that can be turned on and off. It is a living and resilient environment, shaped by trust, sustained by relationships, and dependent on the kind of investment that the Act was designed to provide.

Many of the navigators, weavers, and other leaders driving this work are still here. The plans still exist. The need within communities has not diminished. But without the conditions needed to support the work, the ecosystem cannot reach its full potential.

Congress created the Digital Equity Act because market forces alone will not build the healthy ecosystems that digital equity requires. That remains true. And the longer those systems go untended, the harder they will be to restore.