Trump and Rural America: The Irony is His Strongest Supporters Will Feel the Brunt of His Policies

American Eclectic posts articles twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. This is the third year of publication; previously published articles can be found on my site.

June 15, 2025

In 2021, when Biden was president, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) passed. One of the goals of this act, since there were several goals, was to bring high-speed Internet to rural America. $42.5 billion was provided within the act to aid in achieving this goal. Donald Trump has put this program on hold. While that will hurt the growth of rural high-speed Internet, this has been an ongoing issue that extends back to before Trump or even to Joe Biden.

In 2016, the Obama Administration publicized a program called ConnectALL, which aimed to connect 20 million Americans without broadband access to the Internet.

ConnectALL was not focused only on rural areas. A White House position paper by the Council of Economic Advisers, at the time, stated:

A digital divide remains...with just under half of households in the bottom income quintile using the Internet at home, compared to 95 percent of households in the top quintile.

Furthermore, this paper added:

Since 2009, more than $260 billion has been invested in broadband infrastructure, largely by the private sector but also by the public sector. Investments from the Federal Government alone have led to the deployment or upgrading of over 115,000 miles of network infrastructure. The President has announced concrete steps to ensure that fast and reliable broadband is available to more Americans at the lowest possible cost, and these initiatives are bearing fruit. For example, in 2013 roughly 40 million students lacked access to broadband at their schools and, in response, the President’s ConnectED initiative was created to help connect 99 percent of American students to high-speed broadband in their classrooms and libraries by 2018.

Understanding the Obama Administration as a starting point to look at where helping rural concerns received attention is helpful. Beyond the issue of broadband access for rural communities, issues such as health care, job growth, and educational opportunities started to receive attention: The Government was the answer to confront many of these issues. The Council of Economic Advisers paper referred to the private sector putting $260 billion into broadband infrastructure, which meant that almost all of that private sector funding was focused on metropolitan areas; rural America was ignored.

Back when the country had only one phone company, AT&T, they had a high-low pricing scheme. This worked because the phone company knew it was losing money in rural areas. Putting up phone lines, paying for the crews to maintain those lines, and all the infrastructure that went into maintaining one national phone company system meant that rural areas rarely, if ever, led to AT&T making a profit from its investment in rural communities. The high-low pricing scheme was a system where metropolitan areas were charged more for the cost of phone service to offset the cost in rural areas. The point is that this is nothing new, bringing new technology (back then land-line phones) to rural parts of the country can be expensive for businesses and rarely leads to the investment being offset by profits. Rural communities have often been left behind and are dependent on government programs.

A study from last year highlighted the growing importance of rural communities, specifically individuals, on government support. This study stated, “Income from government transfers is the fastest-growing major component of Americans’ personal income.” And, this report noted the shift toward government dependence in the first two decades of the 21st Century:

In 2000, only about 10 percent of counties received a quarter or more of total personal incomes from transfers. By 2022, the most recent data year, 53 percent did.

Rural counties have the highest dependence on government assistance. In eastern Kentucky, two counties are among the highest in the country: Martin County has 60.86 percent of its residents dependent on government assistance, while Owsley County has 63.17 percent.

Businesses are limited in their willingness to help all Americans. Part of the problem with Trump cutting so many different government programs is that companies cannot replace what the government can do: Rural America will increasingly be left behind.

It is sometimes argued that the government needs to act more like a business to rationalize government spending cuts. This thinking is not new; Literature from the 1890s advocated this. What we started to see emerge in the Biden administration was a more focused approach toward addressing problems with rural America. It is interesting, however, that despite this attention, with money and programs, Biden received little credit or publicity for programs that had the potential to help rural communities that needed assistance from the government. Trump has the opportunity to bring rural America further along. However, his smash-everything approach to cutting government spending and eliminating government programs will significantly harm his core constituency. Anticipate that once the Trump years are behind us, the plight of rural America will become more visible, and this part of his legacy will receive the attention it deserves. Trump has the opportunity to address rural issues that have been emerging for several decades, but, unfortunately, his policies of cutting government programs will do significant harm to rural America.

Michael Harrington’s The Other America, published in 1962, brought poverty to the attention of Americans. Some point to the book as inspiring former President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. This ambitious program, despite conservative criticism of it, helped to bring down the poverty rate from about 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent by 2012.

Considering that so much of rural America is Donald Trump country, you would think that what began to emerge in the Biden administration would have carried over into the Trump administration, where a sustained focus on helping rural communities would benefit Trump's political base.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act spent a lot of money to address America’s infrastructure. CHIPS stands for Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors.

On IIJA, for example, one study stated regarding its potential to help rural areas:

Realizing these goals will require rebuilding America’s electrical grids, bridges, telecommunications, and other infrastructure on a scale not witnessed in decades, and many infrastructure projects will be built in rural communities. In particular, IIJA addresses long-standing shortcomings and underinvestment in broadband and water and wastewater facility development that have systematically left behind rural areas with low population density.

Bringing broadband, for example, to rural America is one thing, but it costs more for customers in rural areas than for urban customers. One study by the Daily Yonder pointed out that, on average, rural zip codes paid $13 more a month for broadband access.

Recently, parts of Lee County in Alabama received high-speed Internet service. The county commission used $4.3 million from the American Rescue Plan to fund access. Before gaining high-speed Internet, residents could access the Internet by dialing to connect using their phones (which many people reading this might remember was the way to access the Internet in the 1990s). As one resident stated:

I’m just glad they’re getting it in this area because it will make a whole lot of people happy. Spectrum only came so far. This will make a whole lot of difference.

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, sometimes called the COVID-19 Stimulus Package, was another program from the Biden administration that aimed to help communities. With its $1.9 trillion price tag, the American Rescue Plan contributed to the inflation that became a centerpiece of the Biden years. Still, its positive impact on communities and individuals cannot be ignored solely to focus on inflation.

One way to look at a program such as the American Rescue Plan is that while it made funds available to more than 26,500 governments of all types across America as the Biden administration started to near its end, it was reported that one in five governments had used less than half the funds they could have used.

One way to understand a program such as the American Rescue Plan is that it is normal not to spend all the money that a local government receives immediately. Knowing the money is available means making decisions about priorities. As one study that looked at this act stated:

We’ve found that after an early focus on providing direct relief and addressing the health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, local governments are now finding a balance between cautious fiscal oversight and experimentation with innovative investments in an equitable recovery.

…These funds, universally welcomed by local leaders that we interviewed, also created unique tests for local government due to a range of factors: initial uncertainty around Treasury guidelines for the program’s eligible uses; compressed expenditure timelines; a general reluctance to commit funding for operating programs or new staff capacity without future sustainable revenue sources; and a lack of incentives in APRA’s design for collaboration across jurisdictions or even among local partners.

Trump’s budget proposals for Fiscal Year 2026 (which begins October 1st of this year) envision massive cuts to domestic programs, many of which benefit rural areas. But, there are cuts to domestic programs now that are having an effect that will be felt in rural communities. Terminating AmeriCorps projects, for example, will adversely impact many rural communities. As one critic of the cuts stated:

These sweeping actions have forced the early dismissal of participants, halted ongoing projects at organizations across the country, and jeopardized critical support for communities nationwide, with particularly severe impacts on rural areas where AmeriCorps programs have traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support.

The Montezuma School to Farm Project in Cortez, Colorado, relies on AmeriCorps. While lawsuits are underway to restore funds to keep AmeriCorps going, the damage in this rural part of Colorado is already being felt and will only increase. As the director of the school-to-farm program stated:

There's a whole trickle-down effect, if we can't grow the food, we can't get it to the food bank, they won't have fresh food to give out.

The title of one article says it all: “Rural Communities and AmeriCorps- A Match Made in Heaven?”

This is the wrong time for an anti-vaccination advocate such as Robert Kennedy, Jr., to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. A gap between the life expectancy of urban and rural citizens has been developing for years. Issues such as cardiovascular disease and drug-overdose deaths weigh more heavily on rural populations. People living in rural areas die at higher rates than people living in urban areas. Again, heart disease, cancer, and COVID have had their impact. While both rural and urban populations saw a decline in deaths, a gap in death rates emerged between rural and urban areas around 2008. This was before COVID-19 became a pandemic we all needed to deal with. One study on COVID vaccinations stated, “In early 2022 in the U.S., rural adults were the least likely to vaccinate against COVID-19 due to vaccine hesitancy and reduced healthcare access.” In the case of the bird flu, if it becomes a serious issue, and vaccinations are available (which is questionable with some of the cuts made to the Department of Health and Human Services), resistance to vaccinations in rural communities will severely devastate communities. Kennedy may not aggressively push for vaccinations, which could lead to unimaginable consequences.

Again, problems of rural America have developed over several decades, and trends will not change, but they can get a whole lot worse as Trump begins to do serious harm to the base of his support. The impact of these health issues is felt on rural hospitals. As one study stated:

Rural Americans are more vulnerable than their urban counterparts, which could lead us to suspect rural health care costs are higher. However, the answer may differ depending on how costs are measured and who is paying.

More than 200 rural hospitals have closed in the last two decades. In other words, many rural patients must travel farther to get care. As Congress determines how to finance Trump’s tax cuts, Medicaid might get some cuts, including some big ones, which means rural hospitals would be impacted. One executive of a rural hospital in Colorado wrote:

[W]e cannot offer all the services our community needs. No rural hospital can. Case in point: Lincoln Health stopped obstetric services nearly 20 years ago; we could no longer recruit specialists to attend to a shrinking number of births. Since then, at least two of our hospital employees have given birth alongside the highway while trying to make it to the nearest labor and delivery ward 85 miles away.

My late wife was an OB/GYN and the Chief of Staff at a rural hospital. She often discussed her complicated pregnancies, saying that one in four pregnancies would be a difficult delivery, so access to needed services was a matter of life and death. Trump’s position on cuts to Medicaid is confusing. He implies he does not want to make cuts, but his Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal calls for cutting $880 billion from programs overseen by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That is the committee that oversees Medicaid.

The spread of broadband is one key to creating a better future for rural America. Everything cannot be done at once, but focusing on one thing can help get other issues pushed along. I have talked with rural county administrators, and they addressed the importance of a new exit if they are fortunate to have an interstate highway run through their counties. That new exit can lead to a new convenience store, road expansion, subdivision, and strip mall. Economic development is the key, and the spread of broadband to rural America matters.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, in addressing the importance of broadband, stated in a report:

It is no secret that technology has become one of the chief barometers of economic health and one of the main engines of economic progress. The so-called "digital divide" — the technological gap between affluent neighborhoods and communities and less prosperous ones — has long been a source of concern.

The above quote was from a 2003 report, yet 22 years later, progress appears to have been limited. The Fiber Broadband Association issued a report at the end of last year and stated:

[T]here has been a widening divide since 1980 between rural and non-rural areas. There are fewer jobs in 2021 than in 2001 and rural per capita income lags behind the national average by more than 20%. The loss of employment and wage stagnation can lead to significant population decline, with growth remaining stagnant at 0% over the past decade.

Furthermore, this study concluded:

Research shows that communities with high broadband utilization experience a [Gross Domestic Product] growth rate of 44%, alongside an 18% increased per capita income.

It is important to note that the gap between broadband access in urban and rural communities has begun to close significantly over the past ten years, so studies demonstrating the economic benefits of broadband access show what can be achieved.

As broadband started to reach some rural communities in the first decade of the 21st Century, the positive impact was noted, as another study stated:

Growth rates between 2001 and 2010 for different economic measures are tested for statistical differences between the treated and non-treated groups, restricting the analysis to non-metropolitan counties. Results suggest that high levels of broadband adoption in rural areas positively (and potentially causally) impacted income growth between 2001 and 2010, and negatively influenced unemployment growth. Similarly, low levels of broadband adoption in rural areas lead to declines in the number of firms and total employment numbers in the county.

Knowing what can be achieved and its impact should lead to government programs supporting the spread of broadband to rural parts of the country without it. Trump has an opportunity to do more than cut government programs, often in disorganized ways, but it appears his core constituency will suffer.

I plan to address the issue of rural Broadband in a future article. Trump’s position appears confusing. Fiber optics is a better way to spread broadband, but Trump has raised the use of satellite access (such as Elon Musk’s Starlink), which is seen as more unstable than fiber optics.

Notes

Leah Abrams, Mikko Myrskla, Neil Mehta, “The growing rural-urban divide in US life expectancy: contribution of cardiovascular disease and other major causes of death,” NIH: National Library of Medicine (August 12, 2021): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34999859/

Suzanne Blake, “Will Trump Cut Medicaid? What the Signs Are Pointing To,” Newsweek (March 17, 2025): https://www.newsweek.com/will-trump-cut-medicaid-what-signs-are-pointing-2046075

Lavea Brachman and Glencora Haskins, “ The American Rescue Plan, two years later: Analyzing local governments’ efforts at equitable, transformative change,” Brookings (March 9, 2023): https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-american-rescue-plan-two-years-later-analyzing-local-governments-efforts-at-equitable-transformative-change/

Justin Brown, “High-speed internet now available for portion of rural Lee County,” 9 WTVM (May 3, 2025): https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/high-speed-internet-now-available-for-portion-of-rural-lee-county/ar-AA1E4lOt?ocid=BingNewsSerp

Drew DeSilver, “Who’s poor in America? 50 years into the ‘War on Poverty,’ a data portrait,” Pew Research Center (January 13, 2014): https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/01/13/whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait/

The Digital Divide and Economic Benefits of Broadband Access, Council of Economic Advisers Issue Brief (March 2016): https:// obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160308_broadband_cea_issue_brief.pdf

Grete Gansauer and Mark Haggerty, “Rural Communities Can Benefit From Infrastructure Funds-if Rollout Is Done Right,” CAP (April 24, 2024): https://www.americanprogress.org/article/rural-communities-can-benefit-from-infrastructure-funds-if-rollout-is-done-right/

Alexis Koskan, Iris LoCoco, Casey Daniel, Benjamin Teeter, “Rural Americans’ COVID-19 Vaccine Perceptions and Willingness to Vaccinate against COVID-19 with Their Community Pharmacists: An Exploratory Study,” NIH: National Library of Medicine (January 13, 2023): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9864964/

Tanya Lewis, “People in Rural Areas Die at Higher Rates Than Those in Urban Areas,” SciAm (December 14, 2022): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-in-rural-areas-die-at-higher-rates-than-those-in-urban-areas/

David A. Lieb, “The clock is ticking for local governments to use billions of dollars of federal pandemic aid,” AP (September 14, 2024): https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-american-rescue-plan-57856355e594a910d1d255deab7d2aaa

Scott MacFarlane, “Trump administration cuts to Americorps causing ‘damage and chaos,’ groups say,” CBS News (May 8, 2025): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/americorps-cuts-trump-administration-terminated-programs/

Autumn Minnich, “Transforming Rural Economies: The Role of Fiber in Economic Growth,” Fiber Broadband Association (October 17, 2024): https://fiberbroadband.org/2024/10/17/transforming-rural-economies-the-role-of-fiber-in-economic-growth/#:~:text=Research%20shows%20that%20communities%20with,18%25%20increased%20per%20capita%20income.

Ilana Newman, “Without AmeriCorps, rural communities will lose essential social services,” KSJD Daytime Collective (May 9, 2025): https://www.ksjd.org/2025-05-09/without-americorps-rural-communities-will-lose-essential-social-services

“Rural Communities and AmeriCorps-A Match Made in Heaven?” National College Attainment Network (March 31, 2021): https://www.ncan.org/news/555865/Rural-Communities-and-AmeriCorps--A-Match-Made-in-Heaven.htm

Kevin Stansbury, “What Medicaid Cuts Would Do to My Rural Hospital,” New York Times (May 2, 2025): https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/opinion/medicaid-cuts-rural-hospitals.html

Michael Steinberger, “Going the Extra Mile, Broadband Internet Comes to Rural Areas in the Fifth District,” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Econ Focus (Winter 2003): https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2003/winter/feature1

Brian Whitacre, “Research and Analysis: Rural Internet Subscribers Pay More, New Data Confirms,” The Daily Yonder (November 28, 2023): https://dailyyonder.com/research-and-analysis-rural-internet-subscribers-pay-more-new-data-confirms/2023/11/28/

Brian Whitacre, Roberto Gallardo, Sharon Strover, “Broadband’s contribution to economic growth in rural areas: Moving towards a casual relationship,” Telecommunications Policy, Volume 38, Issue 11 (December 2014): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308596114000949

Dunc Williams, Mark Holmes, “Rural Health Care Costs: Are They Higher and Why Might They Differ from Urban Health Care Costs?” PubMed (January-February, 2018): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29439106/

Dwayne Yancey, “Who depends most on the federal government? The rural counties who voted heaviest for Trump,” Cardinal News (December 12, 2024): https://cardinalnews.org/2024/12/12/who-depends-most-on-the-federal-government-the-rural-counties-who-voted-heaviest-for-trump/