President Joe Biden recently traveled to North Carolina to promote his goal of affordable internet access for all Americans, but the promise for 23 million families across the U.S. is on shaky ground.

That’s because a subsidy that helps people with limited resources afford internet access is set to expire this spring.

The Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides $30 a month for qualifying families in most places and $75 on tribal lands, will run out of money by the end of April if Congress doesn’t extend it further.

“I think this should be high priority for Congress,” North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who has worked with a bipartisan group of governors to promote the program, said in a phone interview. “To many families, $30 a month is a big deal.”

It matters a lot to Shirleen Alexander of Charlotte, who said the money she saves through the ACP goes toward her grocery bills. It also offsets some of the stress she feels over medical bills.

“If they took (ACP) away, it would be like taking food out of my mouth,” said Alexander, a senior citizen on a fixed income. “I need the service, and some of my senior citizen friends need it, as well.”

The program is key to the Biden administration’s plans to make the internet available to everyone, which the president has touted repeatedly as he has ramped up his reelection campaign. He has likened it to the Rural Electrification Administration, the New Deal program that delivered electricity to much of rural America in the 1930s.

“Our goal is to connect everyone in America to affordable, reliable high-speed Internet by the year 2030, everyone in America, just like Franklin Roosevelt did a generation ago with electricity,” President Biden said in Raleigh last month.

So far, only 43% of eligible households nationwide have signed up for the ACP subsidy. But the program has enabled people who have signed up to avoid the kinds of financial trade-offs Alexander described, said Brian Vo, chief investment officer of Connect Humanity, a nonprofit promoting widespread internet access. It also gives them access to vital services such as telehealth, remote schooling and work, he said.

“If you put ACP and affordability in the context of the social determinants it drives and the economic value created, the benefits far outweigh the cost of $30 per household,” Vo said.

If the program expires, participating families, including nearly 900,000 in North Carolina, will either lose internet access or have to pay more to stay connected.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers recently proposed a bill to sustain the ACP through the end of 2024 with an additional $7 billion in funding — one billion more than what Biden asked Congress to appropriate for the program at the end of last year. However, no votes have been scheduled to move the bill forward and it’s unclear if the program will be prioritized in a divided Congress.