A mesh network internet, it’s more of a hardware, security, and adoption problem but at this point there’s enough wifi overlap in most residential areas that entire towns could have their own local internet without needing the ISP model at all.

If we started with a very basic, touch tone phone and worked from there it might be doable. Seems to me the hard part is breaking through the FCC/Cell company monopoly, so just focusing on how to contact a cell tower and make a voice phone call would be the key.

There’s a running (approximate) tally by department on Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mass_layoffs#Dismissals_by_agency

Last time I added it up the total was somewhere around 34k