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Category: Higher Education

Home for the Holidays?

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The plan is for Congress to finish all its work for the year this week, with a stopgap spending measure to fund the government through next Spring. When in Spring? That’s still a very good question. 

The House Republicans held a conference meeting on Friday that did not resolve how long the stopgap should last or precisely what level of spending it should allow. Without conference agreement, only a handful of House and Senate GOP leaders and staff will decide the substance of a bill that will shape government spending for at least the better part of the current fiscal year. 

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said his goal is to complete all House action by Thursday, but the true deadline is this midnight on Friday, December 9th. That is when the previous CR expires. Failure to pass a new bill would trigger a government shutdown. The new measure will most likely extend current funding levels for most federal agencies through sometime between March and May. A precise timeline had yet to be decided.

Writing the continuing resolution, which generally forbids any new projects, also requires including provisions that allow agencies to make adjustments in their spending to meet changing needs; these are called anomalies. The Pentagon already has complained to budget writers that a long-term stopgap risks doing harm to needed weapons programs and troops currently deployed overseas. While each CR does have a limited amount of anomalies, do not expect broad sweeping increases, such as a multi-billion increase to NIH. 

As the House takes the first steps on the CR, the Senate will consider both 21st Century Cures and the NDAA conference report this week.

Foxx to be Chair of House Education and Workforce Cmte, Trump’s Ed Landing Team

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With approval of the full Republican conference, the House Republican Steering Committee has selected Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) as the chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in the 115th Congress.  She grew up in Appalachia without power and running water and began working as a weaver at age 12 to help support her family. These experiences convinced her that it’s an individual’s hard work, and not federal programs, that lead to success.

As the 73-year-old GOP lawmaker and former community college president, Foxx has been a staunch critic of the Obama Administation’s Department of Education efforts. 

She is a strong supporter of school choice and supports the president-elect’s $20 billion school choice plan emphasizing vouchers. Specifically, she wants to examine the billions doled out annually under Title 1 — a Great Society program that boosts funding to schools catering to poor students. The money is now considered a possible funding source for Trump’s school choice plan. Other items on her agenda: 

  • reexamine the role of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which conservatives revile for its focus on issues such as campus sexual assault and bathroom access for transgender students;

  • reverse a Democratic Congress’ decision to have the Education Department, not banks, issue student loans; and 

  • reverse regulations targeting for-profit colleges.

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Mike Pence’s former general counsel has joined the landing team at the Education Department. Attorney Thomas Wheeler was named to the team Thursday. He served as general counsel for Pence during his time as Indiana governor, according to a 2013 press release from the Republican National Lawyers Association that announced him as a member of its board of governors. Wheeler also has extensive experience representing schools on legal issues, including civil rights-related cases, according to the web site for his law firm in Indianapolis, Frost Brown Todd, LLC.

House Considers NDAA Today

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The House will debate and vote on the compromise National Defense Authorization Act today, likely before noon.

The measure is expected to pass, though it is unclear by how wide a margin. The White House hasn’t indicated where President Barack Obama will come down on the final bill, though it leaves out many of the most controversial provisions that drew Democratic opposition and a veto threat from the administration.

The compromise NDAA ditched the contentious riders, including provisions on the greater sage grouse and workplace protections based on sexual orientation. It’s also expected to include $9 billion on top of the Pentagon’s budget request, incorporating the administration’s $5.8 billion war supplemental request as well as funding to cover military readiness shortfalls.

For FY2017, the NDAA conference agreement would authorize Department of Defense (DoD) Basic Research (6.1) at $2.142 billion (FY16 is $2.309 billion), Science and Technology (6.1-6.3) at $12.489 billion (FY16 is $13.251 billion), and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at $2.957 billion (FY16 is $2.891 billion).

The NDAA conference also would extend the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program until FY2022 (Sec. 1834). The bill would not make any changes to the SBIR/STTR set-aside amounts.

The conference agreement would establish the Manufacturing Engineering Education program (Sec.215), to award grants to industry, non-profits, universities or consortiums of such groups, to enhance or establish new programs in manufacturing engineering education. The Manufacturing Engineering Education program language is a slightly modified version of the Manufacturing Universities language originally included in the Senate-passed FY2017 NDAA bill.

 The FY2017 NDAA report, summary fact sheet and joint explanatory statement are posted here.

The Senate is expected to consider the bill next week.

White House Supports Cures

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Late yesterday, the White House issued a Statement of Administrative Policy (SAP) in support of the 21st Century Cures legislation, which is on the House Floor today.

The SAP expressly calls out the Innovation Fund in the measure, which targets funding for several of the Administration’s health care priorities, as a highlight of the measure.

Read the SAP here. 

Compromise on Cures Heads to House

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The House Rules Committee has noticed that 21st Century Cures will be considered next week. The package is expected on the House floor on Wednesday, November 30. The legislation is expected to be added as an amendment to an existing bill (H.R. 34) to allow for expedited action in the Senate. 

The House Rules Committee’s summary memo is 44 pages. The bill text is just under 1,000 pages. The package contains major provisions in the Cures and Senate Innovation packages, and the Mental Health Crisis Reform Act of 2016, (which includes Sections 9031 and 9032 on college mental health training and services grants and establishes interagency working group on mental health).

Generally

NIH is reauthorized until 2020 and the bill includes provisions intended to address the regulatory burden imposed on researchers, among other provisions. Rather than establish mandatory funding increases for NIH, appropriators would have to release (appropriate) funding each year to the Office of the Director.  The bill establishes a similar mechanism providing $500 million for initiatives at FDA for FYs 2018-2026, and $1 billion for the Secretary to provide to states in FYs 2017 and 2018 for opioid abuse prevention and response efforts.

There are limitations to the general funds going to the office of the Director. The bill also establishes an “Innovation Projects” account for specific initiatives at NIH and FDA, which are special limitations on the general appropriations going to the Office of the Director. For NIH, the bill provides a total of $4.796 billion for FYs 2017-2026 to the NIH director, including $1.4 billion for the Precision Medicine Initiative, $1.564 billion for the BRAIN Initiative, $1.802 billion for cancer research, and $30 million for clinical research to further the field of regenerative medicine using adult stem cells. 

The funding for the Innovation Fund is discretionary, but due to the phrasing in the legislation, monies the Innovation Fund does not count against the appropriators caps. However, the language essentially says that appropriations from the account are subtracted from the discretionary budget authority.  What’s more important is that both CBO and the Administration (the OMB specifically) agree that spending from the Innovation funds do not count against the caps and the language works the way described below. The money will be put in a specific fund every year for the appropriators to use specifically for NIH, FDA, Cancer Moonshot, etc. In lay terms, the funds can only be used for these purposes and every dollar must be used in the next 10 years. 

There are significant inclusions and some noticeable absences including:

  • Section 2034 – Reducing Administrative Burden for Researchers (p 66). This section contains several provisions to reduce administrative burdens on grants, including subrecipients, financial conflict of interest reporting, and reducing burdens on animal care and use in research. 
  • Section 202 – Supports young, emerging scientists by prioritizing policies and programs (p. 45). FY 2017 appropriations includes funds for a national Academies of Science study on improving opportunities for new researcher; and Strengthens NIH’s existing loan repayment programs by increasing the yearly loan repayment amount from $35,000 to $50,000 and streamlining the loan repayment categories.

The revised draft also includes bipartisan, House-passed legislation, the Helping Hospitals Improve Patient Care Act of 2016 (H.R. 5273), that contains several provisions related to socioeconomic status (SES) adjustment and off-campus hospital outpatient department (HOPD) site-neutral payment policy. 

To pay for this effort, the bill includes some of the offsets originally included in H.R. 6, including: 

  • Section 5009. Rescinds $3.5 billion for Prevention and Public Health Fund;
  • Section 5010. Directs the DOE to sell a portion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; 
  • Section 5011. Rescinds $464 million available to U.S. territories under ACA.