Published in cooperation between PRInfinimedia and San Jose Inside
Officials built a lending system that quickly became one of the biggest in the United States during the pandemic, using federal emergency money to lend thousands of devices and boost the tech setup inside library branches.
Budget projections now show a $46 million deficit for 2025-26 and $53 million the following year, a hit that immediately limits how much the program can offer.
Administrators are already outlining what that looks like: fewer laptops and hotspots in rotation, slower turnaround between checkouts and longer lines at branches that once sent people home with a device the same afternoon.
Borrowing a Laptop Still Feels Simple—Keeping Them in Stock Is Another Story
Ten years ago, getting things done online meant finding a computer and a stable connection, but our lives now run through portals that assume everyone already has both. The pandemic sped that shift so quickly that many never caught up, and it left basic services functioning only if your device can keep the pages running without lag.
Government sites make that clear the moment someone tries to complete forms on a phone.
More than 15 percent of American households with children still don't have high-speed internet at home, so when unemployment portals stall, refresh, drop sessions and delete half-completed forms, they end up watching the whole form reset before they can finish it. One glitch and everything typed disappears.
The difference between keeping apps running and working at full speed is visible in every part of online existence. Whether it is schoolwork, job forms or gaming, older hardware forces people to work twice as hard for the same result. Even the casino industry shows the same split, with some players stuck on aging hardware while others run smooth, high-powered setups.
The contrast is brutal inside online poker rooms, where software to help you improve your poker play means a huge boost against those who can't track every hand, analyze betting habits and run simulations on optimal strategies. Tech has brought a competitive edge that sites constantly debate whether to allow it, since players without it face nearly impossible odds against equipped opponents.
The trend repeats everywhere—work, education, government services. People with better tools finish tasks while others wait for the next page to respond. And San Jose feels it directly, with demand rising faster than the number of devices left to lend.
When $500,000 Annual Funding Meets Million-Dollar Needs
San Jose made headlines in 2018 when the city council approved the nation's biggest fiber deployment, a move that brought $500 million in private infrastructure investment and made a $10 million Digital Inclusion Fund running through 2028.
The SJ Access program pays $500,000 every year to community organizations, funding everything from device purchases to digital literacy classes taught in Spanish, Vietnamese and Tagalog.
Since 2020, over 50 organizations have received grants to build tech rooms in neighborhoods where families couldn't afford devices or didn't know how to use them. These weren't just giveaway programs, though—for the first time, the city treated the internet like an essential service rather than a luxury.
The SJ Access program became the city’s main engine, and it grew fast, shifting from simple connectivity to full systems that families actually relied on: devices, internet, training and steady support. City reports made the same point every year: Wi-Fi only helps when households also have the hardware, the skills and someone to call when things break.
The Real Cost of "Free" Device Lending
San Jose Public Library's lending program looks deceptively simple from the outside—walk in, show your library card and wait three weeks for a Chromebook or iPad. Automatic renewals mean keeping it longer if nobody else needs it.
The library now faces three immediate cuts: $90,000 from security budgets, elimination of the career pathways position helping students navigate college applications and $500,000 less for the partnership with San Jose State's King Library. Each cut directly impacts the communities most dependent on these services.
Of course, device maintenance has its own budget nightmare—a dropped laptop means a $200 screen replacement, outdated operating systems require IT staff hours to update, missing chargers cost $30 each to replace, etc. According to a recent report from the American Library Association, many library systems cite device maintenance as their biggest ongoing costs.
And the cuts are just the surface—what happens behind the scenes can be even more expensive. Grant funding usually covers the initial wave of devices, but almost none of the recurring work that keeps them usable, leaving library budgets stretched past their limits.
2026: The Year Everything Changes or Nothing Does
Fiscal year 2026-27 is when the money completely runs out—no more emergency funds or pandemic relief, just regular budgets that already can't cover what cities need. San Jose already started moving money around—the council voted to take Measure E funds meant for affordable housing and redirect up to 90 percent into emergency shelters and homeless outreach.
Sure, people need shelter today, but pulling money from prevention programs all but guarantees more families will need those shelters tomorrow.
But what drives advocates crazy is that 98 percent of households now have internet access, up from 95 percent in 2018. Sounds great until you realize "access" includes people trying to apply for jobs on their phones.
Seattle counted 55,000 residents using screens too small for the tasks they needed to complete, similarly to San Jose, where thousands of people are technically "online" but unable to actually do anything useful because writing a resume on a phone severely limits one’s ability to compete.
Community organizations are trying everything to stay afloat. Some groups turned to models used overseas, leasing devices equipped with lockout software if payments lapse—not ideal, but it keeps laptops in people's hands. Libraries started taking old corporate computers and fixing them up for lending.
The really ambitious ones want cities to build their own internet networks and run them like water departments, which sounds radical here but works fine in plenty of other countries.
The feds might help, but the process remains complex and difficult to access—the Digital Divide Grant Program closed applications in May 2025 after offering up to $250,000 for schools where half the kids qualify for free lunch. Catch is, you need a plan covering devices, internet and training altogether.
That comprehensive approach actually works, but once the grant money's gone, who pays for repairs, replacements and the staff to run everything?
Commitment Behind Infrastructure That Serves Every Resident
Saving these programs means stopping the Band-Aid approach and actually fixing the problem. The cities getting it right treat internet access and devices like job training—invest now, get skilled workers and customers later. They fold computer basics into food banks, bring tech help into health clinics and hand out laptops where families already go for other services.
San Jose got some things right—that fiber network deal from 2018 still makes money that funds other programs. Running grants through the Library Foundation instead of city bureaucracy means more stability and less red tape.
And they figured out that lending someone a laptop without teaching them to use it is pointless—like giving someone a car without teaching them to handle the wheel.
When the feds pumped $7.17 billion into the Emergency Connectivity Fund, it proved that with enough money and commitment, you can actually close digital gaps. But now the emergency's over, the money's gone and cities have to decide: fund this stuff through normal budgets or accept a city where digital ability tracks directly with household income.
What happens in the next year and a half will lock in whether device lending survives, whether families keep their internet and whether we're okay with permanent digital inequality.
For parents trying to help kids with homework on borrowed Chromebooks, for job seekers refreshing listings at the library, for anyone navigating services that went online and never came back—this isn't some abstract policy debate. It's whether they get to participate in modern life or lose access to the basic functions that define 2026.
