Category: Administration

Congress has left town for its seven-week summer recess, having made progress on considering FY 2017 appropriations measures, but both chambers left town without a clear path forward. For the first time in many years (since FY 2010), the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have approved all 12 of their respective FY17 appropriations bills, although none has received final congressional approval.

Despite this progress, there appears to be growing support among House Conservative Republicans for enactment of a six-month continuing resolution (CR), which would last through March 2017, rather than a short-term CR through December that keeps the government funded through the election while an omnibus appropriations package is negotiated. Of note, Congress typically does kick the can on passing a full fiscal year funding in presidential election years,or has since 2002. The lame duck Congress typically leaves the fiscal completion up to the new Administration and not complete full appropriations during a lame duck session, the notable exceptions were 2004 and 2014. 

Among other issues, a long-term CR would place at risk funding increases approved by both appropriations committees for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the possibility of restoring the year-round Pell Grant, as approved by the Senate committee (see next item below).

The House Appropriations Committee needed two days to finish work on its FY 2017 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which it did the morning of July 14. The vote was 31 to 19. This was the first House Labor-HHS-Education bill brought to a full committee vote since 2006.

The bill’s $161.6 billion in discretionary spending is about $257 million below the Senate committee-approved level, $569 million below the FY16 enacted level, and $2.8 billion below the Administration’s FY17 request.

The measure would raise funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to $33.3 billion, an increase of $1.25 billion above the FY16 level. On a party-line vote of 19-29, the committee rejected an amendment to raise NIH funding by an additional $750 million to the Senate committee-approved level of $2 billion. The increase would have been offset by declaring certain other health-related funding in the bill as emergency spending. Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) reiterated the statement he made in the subcommittee markup that he viewed the committee’s NIH funding level as a floor, not a ceiling.

The committee also voted down an amendment that would have restored the year-round Pell Grant. The amendment failed by a vote of 19-27, with two Republicans joining all Democrats in support of the amendment. Chairman Cole said he would welcome restoration of year-round Pell, suggesting the Senate position might prevail in the House-Senate conference on the bill.

The panel also rejected amendments to eliminate four provisions in the bill intended to block Obama administration regulatory actions. Left standing were the provisions to prohibit the Department of Labor from implementing its new overtime rule and to prohibit the Department of Education from moving ahead on regulations on teacher preparation, defining “gainful employment” and “credit hour,” and how states license institutions of higher education.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding includes $165 million for the National Children’s Study, $511.5 million for Clinical and Translational Sciences Awards, and $333.3 million for Institutional Development Awards (IDeA) programs. Other details include:

• $1.26 billion, a $350 million increase, for the Alzheimer’s disease research initiative;
• $195 million, a $45 million increase, for the Brain Research through Application of Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative; and
• $300 million for the Precision Medicine Initiative.

The bill would maintain the salary cap on external NIH grants at Executive Level II of the Federal Executive pay scale.

For higher education, the bill would raise the Pell Grant maximum award to $5,935 through a combination of discretionary and mandatory funds (which is the same as the Administration’s request and the Senate bill).

The circulated report language provided the following funding levels for key higher education programs.

Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants, Federal Work-Study, and Title VI/Fulbright-Hays were flat funded at their FY16 levels of $733 million, $989.7 million, and $72.2 million, respectively. The bill would increase funding for TRIO to $960 million, an increase of $60 million above the FY16 level, and increase funding for GEAR UP to $344 million, an increase of $22 million above the FY16 level.

In contrast, the measure would reduce funding for the Institute for Education Sciences to $536 million, a cut of $81.9 million from the FY16 level. The bill also would zero out funding for the Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) program-the only graduate education-specific aid program left in the Department of Education-on the basis that GAANN duplicates grant funding available through other agencies. The report also encourages using the $100 million that the Administration proposed to use in restoring the Fund for the Improvement and Support of Education (FIPSE) in FY17 to fund the First in the World program.

Meanwhile, it turns out the 10-year forecast it made just six months ago, in President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2017 budget, was way off. A revised forecast, issued Friday by the Office of Management and Budget, identified an extra $881 billion in savings over the next decade, if Obama’s budget were to become law.