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What We’re Reading This Week, May 16-20

Here’s a selection of articles the Federal Relations team is enjoying this week.

Chaos Ensues – The House floor devolved into chaos and shouting on Thursday as a measure to ensure protections for members of the LGBT community narrowly failed to pass after Republican leaders urged their members to change their votes. Read more at The Hill.

Choiceless – The $10 billion Veterans Choice program, created two years ago, was supposed to cut down on wait times and let veterans see private doctors, but now, the faltering program needs an overhaul as numbers, including waits, have skyrocketed. Read more at NPR. 

Mo’ Money, But Still Less in Schools Than Before – the Center for Budgeting and Policy Priorities has a new report out on the trends of state support for public institutions. Though some states have begun to restore some of the deep cuts in financial support for public two- and four-year colleges since the recession hit, their support remains far below previous levels.  In total, after adjusting for inflation, of the states that have enacted full higher education budgets for the current school year, funding for public two- and four-year colleges is $8.7 billion below what it was just prior to the recession. Read the report at CBPP. 

SCOTUS Flag Pole Base (AOC)
SCOTUS Flag Pole Base (AOC)

STEM – The third annual U.S. News/Raytheon STEM Index, out this week, says the US is probably going to have to depend on foreign workers to fill future STEM jobs. The number of graduates who earned STEM masters’ and doctorate degrees rose by 6 percent in 2015. STEM hiring also increased, but there’s still a shortage of STEM workers. Read more at US News. 

Alpha Trump – A controversial long-form piece on how Donald Trump has treated women who have worked for him, dated him, or just been in his orbit. Read it at the New York Times. 

Legacy Building – The Administration is a flurry of activity as various agencies finalize a host of regulations— nearly one-third faster in its final year than during the previous three — all to beat a May 23 deadline to prevent a President Donald Trump from overturning them. Read more at Politico. 

Boom and Bust – The Corinthian Fifteen— students of the now defunct for-profit college who organized a “debt strike,” refusing to repay their student loans even at the risk of going into default—were among the millions of students who enrolled at for-profit universities during the last ten years. Students who went to these schools have come to account for a disproportionate share of the country’s unpaid student-loan balance; they also default at higher rates than other students. So theses student have been bearing a particular burden in the broader student-debt crisis, which has, since 2010, seen student loans overtake credit-card debt and car loans as the second-largest form of outstanding debt in the US. Read more in The New Yorker. 

Due Process and Sexual Assault – Citing an erosion of free speech and due process on college campuses, a group of 21 law professors on Monday released an open letter alleging that the U.S. Department of Education has unlawfully expanded how colleges must define and respond to allegations of sexual assault and harassment. The same argument has been made frequently in recent months by Republican lawmakers who say that the department’s Office for Civil Rights illegally created new regulations through a series of documents instructing colleges how to handle cases of sexual misconduct. Read more at Inside Higher Education.

Potty Breaking the Federal Funds – The federal government says that as a condition of receiving federal funds, schools must comply with Title IX, which says schools may not discriminate based on a student’s sex. How would that impact state and local schools that receive federal funds? Read more at CNN. 

Top 7 Justice Scalia’s absence continues to loom over the court in many ways. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court still has some vital cases on the docket, and no near term replacement to take the split from 4-4. Read more about the cases in Vox. 

Majestic Squirrels – UC Berkeley researchers are researching the communication habits of squirrels, and apparently they’re a lot like us! They too get annoyed when you take their stuff away. Read more at Slate.