Legislative Updates – June 16, 2023

House Education and the Workforce Subcommittee Hearing on Postsecondary Innovation

On Wednesday, the House Education and the Workforce’s Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development held a hearing focused on alternatives to the traditional four-year postsecondary model for today’s students. The hearing featured a discussion of innovative approaches to increase retention and completion, reduce student debt, and support degrees or credentials in high-demand fields. The hearing touched on a variety of topics including competency-based education, short term Pell, financial aid, dual enrollment, accelerated degrees, online education, CTE, evidenced based approaches, and the importance of partnerships between four-year schools and community colleges. A hearing recap from the Committee’s majority staff is available here. Our memo on the hearing may be accessed here. Download the memo to utilize all links.

House Education and the Workforce Full Committee Hearing on Competencies over Degrees: Transitioning to a Skills-Based Economy

On Wednesday, June 22 at 10:15am Eastern, the House Education and the Workforce Committee will hold a hearing on “Competencies over Degrees: Transitioning to a Skills-Based Economy.” More details may be accessed here, and the hearing may be viewed live here. CHP will provide a memo on the hearing.

FY 24 Appropriations

The House and Senate appropriations processes have ramped up significantly over the past week. However, the House approach is a bit different than expected after passage of the bipartisan debt limit agreement, which holds overall domestic funding at current FY 23 levels. Members of the House Freedom Caucus, the most conservative branch of the Republican Conference, expressed continued outrage with Speaker McCarthy over higher spending levels for domestic programs in the debt limit agreement and held the floor hostage last week preventing any movement of legislation until their concerns about overall spending were addressed.

Speaker McCarthy acceded to the demands of the Freedom Caucus, agreeing that the spending levels in the debt limit agreement were a ceiling not a floor. This approach was reflected in the funding allocations provided to each of the twelve House appropriations subcommittees earlier this week by Chair Kay Granger (R-TX). The House allocation would provide a $159 billion cut to domestic discretionary programs, including a 29% overall cut to the Labor-HHS bill that funds higher education and workforce programming. Their bill would also include $115 billion in “claw backs” in unspent funding. Many of these claw backs will be used as an accounting mechanism to restore overall funding, but we don’t know where this additional funding would be allocated or how much will go to the Labor-HHS bill. House Appropriations Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) told CHP earlier this week that these bills are “unworkable.” We expect it to be a highly partisan process, with the House majority hoping to move all twelve bills to the floor before the August recess.

Senate Appropriators plan on beginning their markups next week, and also plan on announcing their funding allocations for each of the 12 appropriations subcommittees. Both Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) and Ranking Member Susan Collins (R-ME) have indicated they would like to move bipartisan bills that reflect the overall funding levels in the debt limit agreement. As a result, we will not see significant cuts in the Senate process and expect at least some, if not all, of the appropriation bills to move through the Senate floor this year, which would be the first time in three years any appropriation bill has moved through that chamber.

There is not a lot of time on the Congressional calendar between now and the August recess for floor action, as Congress will go out of session at the end of the next week for two weeks, returning for three weeks in July before going on recess through the month of August and not returning until after Labor Day.

How the House and Senate bills will be reconciled later this year is an open question. However, the debt limit agreement requires all appropriation bills to be completed by the end of the calendar year. If not, a one percent cut to every appropriation bill at FY 23 funding levels will be mandated. This provision may provide the Senate with significant leverage over their House counterparts, as Senate Democrats could attempt to hold the Labor-HHS bill until the end of the calendar year to force their Republican colleagues to include higher funding levels for Labor HHS in order to ensure defense related measures avoid cuts.