Can the Affordable Connectivity Program be Sustainable?

By now, everybody has written about the pending end of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). The White House asked Congress to fund the ACP for a year for over $6 billion, and almost everyone I know is betting against a miracle from Congress. But even if the ACP gets funded somehow, how sustainable is the ACP if Congress has to act every year to renew it? There have been calls for moving the ACP under the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund (USF). That would be a way to make the plan sustainable and remove it from the annual Congressional budget battles, but $6 billion a year would be a heavy push for the USF. There is no predicting Congress, and this bill could come up for a floor vote in time to save the fund for 2024. But I think it’s more likely that a Congress that can’t seem to pass a budget will not do anything with the ACP before the fund runs dry, and will ignore it after it does.