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Category: Higher Education

Senate HELP committee to vote on key bills

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 On Thursday, February 26, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee will vote on several significant bills regarding access to quality education and health care.

The bills under consideration include:

  • S. 1602, Mathematical and Statistical Modeling Education Act
  • S. 1558, Understanding the True Cost of College Act of 2025
  • S. 3747, Home School Graduation Recognition Act
  • S. 1782, Charlotte Woodward Organ Transplant Discrimination Prevention Act
  • S. 1552, Living Donor Protection Act of 2025
  • S. 3315, Health Care Cybersecurity and Resiliency Act of 2025

Date: Thursday, February 26, 2026

Time: 10:00 AM ET/ 9:00 AM CT

Location: 430 Dirksen Senate Office Building

Link to watch live

Congress Home for the Holidays

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After a busy week, Senators huddled on the floor Thursday night as they made an eleventh-hour attempt to find a path forward on bringing up a bundle of five bills or minibus for consideration before the end of 2025. No agreement to move forward was reached after Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, both of Colorado, announced they would hold up the package after White House OMB director Russ Vought’s decision to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is based in Colorado.

 

The package under consideration in the Senate would fund the Departments of Defense, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce (including NOAA), Health and Human Services (including NIH), Transportation, Labor and Interior, along with the EPA and NSF.

A few Republican Senators have held the bill from moving forward but released a hold after Senate leadership agreed to an amendment vote on stripping earmarks in the legislation. The Colorado hold is new to the OMB decision.

The Senate will resume consideration and negotiations in January.

 

 

Administration Seeks to Dismantle ED by Moving Programs to Different Agencies

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While publicly acknowledging earlier this year that Congressional approval would be needed to officially terminate the Education Department, the Administration announced today a series of Interagency Agreements (IAA) to move vast portions of its portfolio to other agencies in an effort to dismantle it from the inside.  The announcement from ED is available here.

Specifically, ED is proposing to move six sets of programs to four other federal agencies:

  • Programs  currently under jurisdiction of Office of Higher Education (NOT Title IV student financial aid programs) and the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education would be transferred to the Department of Labor– the factsheets for these agreements are here and here.
  • Most of tribal and Native American education programs would be moved to the Department of Interior– the factsheet is available here.
  • International Education and Foreign Language Studies would be shipped to State Department– the factsheet on that transfer is available here. 
  • Two sets of programs would be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services:  Foreign Medical Accreditation and Child Care Access Means Parents in School– the factsheets for these proposed moves are here and here.

Additional reports about the proposed moves are available here, here, and here.

Although these moves have been proposed by the Administration, they are unlikely to be the last word on this front.  We should expect legal and other challenges to today’s annoucements.

Trump Signs Orders on Admissions and Grantmaking

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On Thursday, President Trump signed two new executive orders relating to admissions and federal grantmaking. See summaries and links below.

 

Ensuring Transparency in Higher Educations Admissions

EO here and Fact Sheet here

“ENSURING ACCOUNTABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum directing the Secretary of Education to require higher education institutions receiving Federal financial assistance to be transparent regarding their admissions practices.

  • The Memorandum directs the Secretary of Education to revamp the online presentation and data collection of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to make it efficient, easily accessible, and intelligibly presented for parents and students.
  • The Memorandum instructs the Secretary of Education to expand the scope of required reporting for institutions’ admissions data in order to provide adequate transparency as determined by the Secretary of Education.
  • The Memorandum further instructs the Secretary of Education to increase accuracy checks for data submitted by institutions through IPEDS and take remedial action if institutions fail to submit data in a timely manner or submit incomplete or inaccurate data.”

 

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking

EO here and Fact sheet here

Sec. 3. Strengthening Accountability for Agency Grantmaking. (a) Each agency head shall promptly designate a senior appointee who shall be responsible for creating a process to review new funding opportunity announcements and to review discretionary grants to ensure that they are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest. For the avoidance of doubt, this process shall not guarantee any particular level of review or consideration to funding applicants except as consistent with applicable law.

Sec. 4. Considerations for Discretionary Awards. (a) Senior appointees and their designees shall not ministerially ratify or routinely defer to the recommendations of others in reviewing funding opportunity announcements or discretionary awards, but shall instead use their independent judgment.

(b) In reviewing and approving funding opportunity announcements and discretionary awards, as well as in designing the review process described in section 3(a) of this order, senior appointees and their designees shall, as relevant and to the extent consistent with applicable law, apply the following principles, including in any scoring rubrics used to assess grant proposals:

(i) Discretionary awards must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.

(ii) Discretionary awards shall not be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate:

(A) racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination by the grant recipient, including activities where race or intentional proxies for race will be used as a selection criterion for employment or program participation;

(B) denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic;

(C) illegal immigration; or

(D) any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.

(iii) All else being equal, preference for discretionary awards should be given to institutions with lower indirect cost rates.

Sec. 6. Implementation and Termination Clauses. (a) Within 30 days of the date of this order, each agency head shall review the agency’s standard grant terms and conditions and submit a report to the Director detailing:

(i) whether the agency’s standard terms and conditions for discretionary awards permit termination for convenience and include the termination provisions described in 2 CFR 200.340(a), including the provisions that an award may be terminated by the agency “if an award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities” or, in the case of a partial termination by the recipient, if the agency “determines that the remaining portion of the Federal award will not accomplish the purposes for which the Federal award was made”;

(ii) whether the agency’s standard terms and conditions for discretionary foreign assistance awards permit termination based on the national interest; and

(iii) the approximate number of active discretionary awards at the agency, as well as the approximate percentage of funding obligated under those awards that contains termination provisions allowing for termination under the circumstances described in subsection (i) of this section.