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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGMay 20, 2026

This Convicted Felon Gets $1 Million a Year to Sell Obsolete Internet Service. You Pay for It.

ProPublica published an investigation revealing that Roger Shoffstall, a convicted felon who served three years in federal prison for tax evasion, owns Summit Telephone in Alaska and receives over $1 million annually in federal Universal Service Fund subsidies meant to bring broadband to rural areas. The company provides internet service slower than most of the U.S., and the FCC has not publicly investigated or cut off Shoffstall's subsidies despite having authority to do so for convictions related to fraud.

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Should the federal government be required to vet contractors' criminal histories before handing them broadband subsidies, or does that create barriers that prevent rehabilitation and competition? A $1 million annual contract just raised the stakes.

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Whether FCC inaction reveals systemic rot or fixable enforcement gap
Liberal
The FCC watched Shoffstall run his company from prison and didn't act — that's not a resource problem, it's institutional indifference. Fourteen years between his conviction and ProPublica's investigation with zero documented FCC response. That pattern suggests the agency has lost the basic instinct to enforce the rules it already has.
Conservative
You're right that the FCC failed to act, but you're treating that failure as evidence the whole program should be suspect rather than evidence this specific agency needs actual enforcement teeth. The E-Rate program had the same problem before 2014, then the FCC created a dedicated compliance bureau and fixed it without eliminating school broadband funding. Why is that not the template here?
Liberal
Because fourteen years isn't a failure we stumbled into — it's a failure we tolerated. If the FCC needed E-Rate to nearly collapse into scandal before acting, why would adding another bureau to the same agency that ignored Shoffstall for a decade suddenly create urgency? You're asking us to trust an institution that has already proven it won't.
Conservative
But you're still conflating institutional neglect with institutional rot. The difference matters: neglect can be fixed by restructuring incentives and oversight; rot means the program itself is the disease. You haven't shown the latter.
Rural Alaska's dependency on subsidies versus market solution viability
Liberal
You say the Universal Service Fund has lost the ability to enforce accountability. But Alaska's geography doesn't change: no private telecom builds fiber to a bush village of 400 people accessible only by plane. Eliminating USF doesn't produce competition — it produces nothing.
Conservative
I'm not arguing rural Alaska deserves no investment. I'm saying when you insulate a program from market discipline and consumer choice, it calcifies around its own continuity rather than its mission. The answer might be targeted intervention for genuinely unviable markets — but not a $1.5 million annual subsidy to a felon delivering below-average service while Alaskan consumers foot the bill.
Liberal
You're sliding from 'this recipient is bad' to 'therefore the program is bad.' Those are different problems. Shoffstall should lose his subsidy tomorrow. But cutting him off doesn't answer the question: who delivers broadband to that village next?
Conservative
That's the honest question — and the answer might be that some markets genuinely need permanent subsidies, but not without ironclad performance standards and enforcement that actually happens, not just exists on paper.
FCC's statutory authority and failure to exercise it
Liberal
The FCC has explicit statutory power to cut subsidies to recipients convicted of fraud-related crimes. It hasn't used that power once in Shoffstall's case. That's not a gray area — that's clear dereliction of a duty Congress already gave them.
Conservative
True, and that's damning. But why didn't they act? If your answer is 'because the agency is indifferent,' you're back to arguing the program is broken. If the answer is 'insufficient resources or unclear procedures,' that's a management problem the E-Rate precedent shows can be fixed.
Liberal
I don't know which it is, but I know that after a decade, the burden of proof shifts. The FCC had the authority, had the facts, and chose inaction. At some point you have to ask whether this agency deserves more resources or whether it deserves to keep managing this much public money.
Conservative
Fair — but 'we don't know why they failed' isn't actually an argument for dismantling the fund. It's an argument for demanding specific answers about why enforcement broke down and whether those failures are replicable elsewhere.
Subsidy growth despite poor performance and continued violations
Liberal
Subsidies grew from $1.1 million to $1.5 million after Shoffstall's release, while he was delivering internet slower than most of the country. Meanwhile, he violated probation and returned to prison in 2013, and the subsidies kept flowing with no documented FCC response for over a decade. That's not a marginal failure.
Conservative
You're right that subsidies growing while performance declined is indefensible. But that's an argument for mandatory service-speed audits and performance bonding tied to continued funding — the same tools E-Rate adopted. It's not an argument that the program itself should be eliminated, because that only helps Shoffstall by clearing the field of his competitors.
Liberal
Except your competitors argument assumes a market exists. In rural Alaska, there is no competitor waiting in the wings. Shoffstall isn't preventing competition — the terrain is. The relevant question is whether this specific operator deserves another $1.5 million, and the answer is obviously no.
Conservative
Agreed on Shoffstall. Where we part is whether saying no to him requires saying no to the program itself, rather than saying yes to enforcement that actually works.
Consumer funding model and accountability to ratepayers
Liberal
The USF is financed by mandatory surcharges on phone bills — a tax in all but name. Shoffstall's customers are literally paying for his $1.5 million subsidy while receiving obsolete service. That's accountability failure at the point of impact.
Conservative
True, and that's why the subsidy model is worth defending only if it's reformed. But 'mandatory surcharges fund bad infrastructure' is not actually an argument against the fund — it's an argument for the enforcement mechanism that's supposed to prevent exactly this outcome. The surcharge structure isn't the problem; the missing accountability is.
Liberal
The surcharge structure enables the problem because it's invisible to most consumers. They can't defect; they can't shop around. The only accountability available is regulatory, and the regulatory mechanism failed for fourteen years. That's the leverage point that matters.
Conservative
Then the fix is making that regulatory mechanism visible and active, not eliminating the surcharge. Otherwise you're punishing rural customers for the FCC's negligence.
What happens to Alaska communities if subsidies are cut
Liberal
You talk about the program losing its mission, but the actual mission — connectivity for remote communities that the market won't serve — is getting accomplished, even badly. Cut the funding and that mission doesn't improve, it disappears. Alaska Native communities lose what they have.
Conservative
I haven't proposed cutting funding to communities; I've proposed cutting it to operators who commit financial crimes and fail to deliver. If Shoffstall loses his subsidy, that money could flow to a replacement operator or fund a community broadband cooperative. The alternative — letting him keep it because his region has no other option — is holding rural Alaska hostage to regulatory negligence.
Liberal
You're assuming a replacement operator appears. In geography like Alaska's, that's often an unfounded assumption. The real harm isn't to Shoffstall — it's to customers left with no service while you work out the alternatives.
Conservative
Which is why the urgent step isn't program elimination, but mandatory operator replacement tied to performance benchmarks. You can do that without waiting for perfect market conditions.
Conservative's hardest question
The strongest challenge to this argument is that Alaska's geography genuinely may make private broadband investment unviable without subsidy, meaning cutting off Summit could leave remote communities with no service at all rather than slow service — a real human cost that market discipline cannot solve and that my argument does not fully reckon with.
Liberal's hardest question
The FCC has had over a decade — from Shoffstall's 2010 conviction through his 2013 probation violation to ProPublica's 2024 investigation — to act and has not. That's not a resource problem; that's an institutional indifference problem that reform rhetoric alone cannot easily explain away.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides agree that the FCC had clear statutory authority to investigate and cut off Shoffstall's subsidies after his 2010 conviction but failed to exercise it for over a decade, representing a concrete institutional failure rather than ambiguous regulatory discretion.
The real conflict
FACTUAL/CAUSAL: Conservatives argue the FCC's decade-long inaction reflects systemic institutional indifference baked into agencies accountable to Congress rather than consumers, while liberals argue it reflects inadequate resources and enforcement capacity that targeted reforms (like the post-2014 E-Rate bureau) can remedy — this is a dispute about root cause, not just severity.
What nobody has answered
If the FCC is genuinely indifferent to enforcement despite possessing statutory authority, what specific structural change would create actual consequences for the agency's neglect — and would that change be politically achievable, or is the conservative critique implicitly an argument that no amount of reform will work because Congress itself has no incentive to demand it?
Sources

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