The University of Washington’s 2018 Federal Agenda is available for you to view. Thank you to everyone on campus who participated in the federal agenda development process in the fall. We look forward to seeing many of you in DC this spring! Click through below to view a pdf version.
Here is a selection of articles we’ve read this week.
FY2019 PBR: On Feb. 12, the Trump administration released its 2019 budget proposal for changes to make to the federal government’s spending. Many of the cuts in the plan are unlikely to become reality: Congress just increased spending limits last week, and it rarely dares to change entitlement programs. Read more from Washington Post.
Attention Grad Students!: Graduate students don’t typically make news. But during the recent battle over tax reform, lawmakers looked into capping or eliminating financial benefits that enable most students to pursue graduate degrees. Though the urgent headlines have died down, lawmakers and higher-education leaders are still considering a number of proposals over the next several months that could affect students in graduate programs. More from the Wall Street Journal.
DACA Deadline Looms: A March 5 deadline is looming for Washington to come up with a resolution for nearly 700,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and currently protected from deportation. The young people, their schools and employers are beginning to make contingency plans in case they have to leave the country, or face unemployment. More from the Wall Street Journal.
Campus Sexual Abuse Bill: A bipartisan group of U.S. senators has introduced legislation to hold campus leaders accountable for sexual abuse that happens on their watch. The bill, the Accountability of Leaders in Education to Report Title IX Investigations Act, or the Alert Act for short, was introduced on Thursday. It would require college and university presidents to certify annually that they have reviewed all incidents of sexual misconduct reported to their campus Title IX coordinator, and that they have not interfered with investigations of those incidents. Read more from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Infrastructure!: The president’s long-awaited infrastructure plan pushes state and local governments to spend more but offers them a smoother path to getting federal regulatory approval. Read more from Governing.
The Senate on Thursday effectively failed to move forward with any of four immigration proposals put forward today. This included a Republican proposal backed by President Donald Trump that would grant 1.8 million “Dreamers” a path to citizenship and provide $25 billion for a border wall and security improvements.
The action came on a 39-60 vote to limit debate on an amendment by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA), to an unrelated bill (HR 2579) related to the Administration’s “Four Pillars” proposal Sixty votes were needed to invoke cloture.
Grassley’s proposal mirrored Trump’s framework to provide a path to citizenship for Dreamers brought to the United States as children in exchange for border security funding. It would also end family-based immigration or “chain migration” and phase out a diversity lottery program. Democrats considered the restrictions on family-based immigration a nonstarter.
The Senate earlier rejected three other immigration proposals, including a bipartisan deal by 16 mostly centrist Senators, calling themselves the “Common Sense Caucus,” that Trump threatened to veto because it did not do enough to limit family-based immigration.
All amendments failed this afternoon.
There was no clear path forward in the House for any of these proposals.
Today Dr. Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and UW Professor of Computer Science, was invited by the subcommittee chair to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Technology in the first of two committee meetings slated to discuss the future of artificial intelligence. Dr. Etzioni was joined by experts from Intel, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and NVIDIA. Check out the hearing on YouTube.
The President’s Budget request for HHS proposes $95.4 billion in discretionary budget authority and $1,120 billion in mandatory funding while proposing to shift many mandatory programs to discretionary, including GME. The budget would also consolidate all GME funding into one program while maintaining the site caps. Additionally, the budget proposes to cut or eliminate all public health training funding, including Title VII and Title VIII (Nursing Workforce Development received $83 million, a $145 million cut).
Certain research functions from across the HHS are proposed to be consolidated within NIH and established as three new NIH institutes: the National Institute for Research on Safety and Quality; the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, including the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program; and the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.
Prior to the two-year budget deal passed by Congress, NIH was slated for a 27 percent cut, but would now receive $35.517 billion.
Overall, NIH fared well considering, highlights include:
The budget does impose a salary cap as to the percentage of investigator salary that can be paid with grant funds and by reducing the limit for salaries paid with grant funds from $187,000 to $152,000 and includes a provision to “cap the percentage of investigator salary that can be paid with grant funds to 90 percent of total salary” for principal investigators funded by NIH. The budget does discuss that the Administration has been prohibited from instituting or investigating an F&A cap by Congress.
HHS Budget in Brief: summarizes NIH proposals on pages 44-50 of the PDF (40-46 of the document)/
Budget Addendum: reflecting changes after the enactment of the Bipartisan Budget Act on Friday