(credit: Dominik Meissner)

It’s no surprise that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai rolled back some of the changes made by former Chair Tom Wheeler. After Donald Trump’s election ensured that the FCC would switch to Republican control, Pai warned Wheeler against “midnight regulations” that can “quickly be undone” by new leadership. On Friday last week, Pai undid a few Wheeler-era decisions while saying that actions no longer supported by the commission’s majority “should not bind us going forward.”

But one decision in particular is galling to advocates for low-income Americans who can’t afford broadband Internet service. As we reported, the FCC on Friday told nine companies that they can no longer provide subsidized broadband to customers who qualify for the Lifeline program. This 32-year-old program gives poor people $9.25 a month toward communications services, and it was changed last year to support broadband in addition to phone service.

FCC procedures make it easy to overturn any recent action, and these nine companies gained their Lifeline broadband approvals late in Wheeler’s tenure. Pai’s FCC says the commission wants to implement new measures to combat fraud and waste in the Lifeline program and that revoking the Lifeline designations will provide additional time to achieve that. But none of the nine providers was accused of fraud, and the FCC already has the power to investigate and punish any provider that defrauds the program. Pai could have let these companies continue selling subsidized broadband to poor people as long as they committed no fraud, but he chose not to.