Gore's Costly High-Wire Act

What keeps Al Gore up at night? A few months ago, the Vice President was literally jolted awake at 3 a.m. by the idea of a continuous, live Internet image of this planet, an all-earth-all-the-time website. Within weeks, NASA was scrambling to put up the satellites to make his dream come true. Last July 4 he skipped the fireworks so he could stare for five hours into his office computer as it downloaded Pathfinder's first images from the surface of Mars. Another Gore brainchild--he calls it "digital earth"--would allow students with computers to zoom in on any spot of an onscreen planet to learn everything they possibly want to know about it.

It sometimes seems as if Gore views the world through his modem--and would like everyone else to do as well. His staff jokes that the quickest way to get his attention is by e-mail. But Gore is serious in his belief that technology educates and democratizes. It is both the hallmark of his vice presidency and the organizing principle of his presidential campaign.

But these days, not everyone is on the Vice President's bandwidth. His biggest high-tech achievement to date is a program to wire every classroom and library in the country. He has heralded it as "a turning point that [will] transform the shape of America." But right now, the program is under assault from Congress as an out-of-control entitlement engineered by an out-of-control bureaucracy. Which does not do much for Gore's reputation as the architect of reinventing government. Even more ominous is another threat: starting this summer, phone companies that were ordered to pay for the program are threatening to add a new charge to the long-distance bills of residential consumers. Critics are already calling it the Gore Tax.

What once seemed an unassailable idea is now ensnared in presidential politics, the byzantine workings of phone deregulation and the design flaws of a funding scheme that camouflages the costs of a huge new federal program by putting it on people's phone bills. Only 75 days into the first round of applications for the program's money, about 30,000 schools and libraries have rushed in to claim $2 billion, far outstripping the $625 million the Federal Communications Commission has collected from the phone companies. This has left the commission with the unpalatable option of scaling back its promises or collecting more from the phone companies and their customers. And it doesn't help the commission's political predicament that the quasi-private corporation set up to administer the program was deemed illegal by the General Accounting Office, or that it was paying $200,000 a year to its chief executive, former White House aide Ira Fishman.

Higher phone bills and overpaid bureaucrats are not easy things for lawmakers to defend in an election year. "We did not vote to have the FCC set up a giant bureaucracy headed by someone paid as much as the President," thunders Democrat John Dingell, ranking minority member of the House Commerce Committee. "The era of Kings in this country ended when we kicked out George III."