Ghost Internet Drains Bills Nationwide

Stone entrance sign for U.S. Army Fort McCoy — Photo: Aaron of L.A. Photography / Shutterstock

On a nearly deserted Alaska island, Americans quietly shell out $340,000 a year for internet nobody uses.

Story Snapshot

Federal phone fees fund obsolete internet to hundreds of empty buildings on Adak Island.
No residents subscribe to the subsidized service; they switched to Starlink instead.
The Universal Service Fund pours billions into rural telecom, with growing concerns about waste.
Adak shows how good intentions turned into a ghost subsidy that never shuts off.

An abandoned Navy base with a very live internet bill

Adak Island sits near the far end of the Aleutian chain, a former Navy base where war planners once watched the North Pacific and the Soviet Union. The troops are long gone. Most families left years ago. Only a few dozen people remain, scattered among hundreds of vacant houses and empty barracks. Yet every phone customer in America helps pay more than $340,000 a year to keep internet lines active in those empty buildings.

Reporters from Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica traced this money trail back to the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund. This fund, created in the 1990s and expanded for broadband in 2011, was meant to make phone and internet service affordable in rural and high-cost areas. To do that, the government adds a fee to your phone bill and then sends billions of dollars to telecom companies that promise to serve remote places like Adak.

The internet nobody on Adak wants or uses

The Adak subsidy goes to a local provider that keeps wiring connected to more than 300 buildings on the island, almost all of them empty. The service is slow, often stuck at speeds that feel like dial-up in a streaming world. Residents told reporters they do not subscribe to this internet at all. There is “zero indication” that any of the people still living on Adak use the government-subsidized service, despite the large annual bill.

Instead, the people who stayed on Adak now get online through Starlink, the satellite service run by Elon Musk’s company. Starlink arrived in 2023 without any help from the Federal Communications Commission. Locals say Starlink is up to 40 times faster than the old wired service. It costs about $90 to $140 a month, which is still steep but far cheaper than the hundreds of dollars the legacy provider once charged on top of its subsidies.

What taxpayers really fund through the Universal Service Fund

The Universal Service Fund is not some niche program tucked in a budget line. It now disburses roughly $8 to $9 billion each year across four main programs, including the High-Cost mechanism that supports rural carriers. Every major phone company must pay into the fund based on its interstate and international revenues, and most pass the cost straight to customers as a “universal connectivity” or similar fee on monthly bills. That means a family in Ohio or Texas is helping pay for Adak’s unused internet.

Policy experts say waste and misdirected subsidies are not rare in this system. One analysis found billions of dollars in global universal service funds sitting unused or spent on things other than real connectivity. A free-market study of the United States programs argues that the High-Cost program, which pays rural carriers like those serving Adak, has failed and is plagued by losses and payments to ineligible or unnecessary projects. Adak’s ghost internet looks like a textbook example of that problem.

How a ghost-town subsidy keeps going year after year

Adak’s story did not start with Starlink. Years ago, federal regulators wrestled with how much support to give the island’s phone and internet company as rules were changing. In one order, the Federal Communications Commission granted additional months of support at pre-existing levels so Adak providers would have time to adjust and customers would not be cut off suddenly. That safety net made sense when more people lived there and had no other way to connect.

But the world changed. Residents left, new technology arrived, and the old service never kept up. Investigative reporting now shows that the subsidy still flows, even though the product is obsolete and the customer base has vanished. From a conservative, common-sense view, this looks less like helping rural America and more like feeding a zombie program that nobody is willing to shut down. The fear of “abandoning” remote communities becomes an excuse to pay for internet in buildings with no people.

What Adak tells us about bigger fights over broadband and accountability

Adak is only one island, but it sits inside a much larger debate over the future of the Universal Service Fund. Congress, courts, and regulators are now arguing over whether this fee system is constitutional, fair, and effective. Rural broadband remains a popular cause, and many Americans support helping remote towns stay connected. Yet the same time, watchdogs keep finding examples like Adak that show money going to dead infrastructure while real families struggle with poor service somewhere else.

🔴 U.S. pays $340k/year for internet at abandoned Alaska Navy base with no users

Adak Island, a former Naval Air Facility closed in 1997, maintains a population below 100. The federal government pays an Anchorage firm $340,000 annually to provide broadband internet service to… pic.twitter.com/twC4yU2qrb

— NewsTongue (@NewsTongueX) July 21, 2026

Common-sense reform would not mean cutting off the handful of households still living at the edge of the Aleutians. It would mean proving that a line has a living customer before sending large checks. Some analysts propose simple residency verification and tying support to modern technologies like fixed wireless or low-earth-orbit satellites, which already serve places like Adak far better than copper wires in abandoned Navy housing. Until that happens, taxpayers will keep paying for internet in empty rooms, and Adak will stand as a quiet warning about what happens when spending keeps going long after the people leave.