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What We’re Reading This Week, March 28 – April 1

Posted on March 31, 2016March 31, 2016

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

It’s Not The Hunger Games – It’s college acceptance letter season, and it’s not all obsessively checking the mailbox (not just because most acceptance comes electronically these days). What’s more college isn’t (despite public and Hollywood perception) all ivy covered walls and hallowed halls. Read more at the Five Thirty-Eight.

Lawyer Up – Nationally, college campuses now are relying on lawyers, case workers, advocates and other officials to help negotiate changing ideas and standards of sexual behavior. Read more in The New York Times.

Yes We Can! – The Congressional Budget Office projected a $7.7 billion surplus in funding for the federal Pell grant program this year, which means the government may have enough money to offer low-income students more financial aid. Read more in The Washington Post.

Creative Financing – Facing a $220 million budget shortfall, Democrats in Connecticut have proposed taxing the unspent earnings of university endowments with more than $10 billion in assets. Only Yale’s $25.6 billion endowment—the country’s second largest after Harvard—fits the tax bill. Yale’s tax-exempt investments earned $2.6 billion last year, eight times more than the University of Connecticut’s $384 million endowment. Read more in The Wall Street Journal.

Secret Communications – In ISIS’s training and operational planning, the group appeared to routinely use a piece of software called TrueCrypt. Before companies like Apple and Microsoft built encryption into their products, TrueCrypt and programs like it were the primary means for securing files and disks by those with a privacy bent of whatever stripe. Read more in The New Yorker.

Actually, It’s Abuse – Last week, a man hijacked an Egyptian aircraft because he wanted to get a message to his wife about how much he loved her. His wife says he was unpredictable and abusive. Read more in The New York Times.

Managed to Make Literally Everyone Mad – In a rare moment, for Trump, of saying too much and experiencing blowback, Donald Trump blew up the news cycle on Wednesday by telling Chris Matthews at a town hall that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions if the procedure is outlawed. Literally, every group hated these comments, which he’s tried to walk back. Read more at Vox. Vox also explains what the issue with Trump’s campaign manager was earlier in the week. Read it at Vox.

Impressively Bad – Poll numbers are in and Donald Trump is viewed unfavorably by at least 80 percent of some of the groups that Republican strategists had hoped the GOP might improve among: young voters and Latinos. Also, he’s viewed unfavorably by three our of four moderates. Oh, he’s viewed unfavorably by non-college whites by 52 percent. Read more in The Washington Post.

NIH Reinforces Commitment to Basic Science

Posted on March 25, 2016May 19, 2017

This week Dr. Francis Collins and senior leadership at NIH published a letter in Science reinforcing the agency’s commitment to basic science and introducing a revision to our grant application instructions. The updated instructions will ensure that the public health relevance statement in grant applications better reflects the full spectrum of the NIH mission and its commitment to support a robust, diverse research portfolio, including pursuit of basic knowledge. The full text of the letter can be viewed here.

What We’re Reading This Week, March 21-25

Posted on March 24, 2016

The House and Senate headed out for the Easter Recess this week, but the news kept coming. Here is a selection of articles the Federal Relations team enjoyed reading this week.

Climate Science in Science – Last week, the House Science Committee held a hearing on NOAA’s FY17 budget proposal. Overall, the hearing did not go badly, but the occasion did not pass without grilling NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan about climate change. Read more in the Washington Post.

I Like Ike – The last brokered Republican convention was in 1952 between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Robert A. Taft, and they didn’t like each other. While that was ugly, the rhetoric leading up to the 1952 convention wasn’t nearly as heated and vitriolic as 2016. Read more about that convention in Vox.

Sock a Little Away – A recent open records request revealed that the federal government is concerned about the financial management of many institutions of higher education and some of with concerns are surprising. ED has requested many colleges, including Drexel University and Bryn Mawr College, to set aside money in exchange for access to federal grants and loans, signaling that their financial management may be on shaky ground. While most of the attention of poor financial management is paid to for-profit institutions, which does comprise a signifiant number of colleges under scrutiny (400 schools with letters are for-profit institutions), there are more traditional, nonprofit institutions (148) also causing concerns. Read more in The Washington Post.

O’la Cuba – President Obama made a monumental trip to Cuba, the first American leader to set foot on Cuban soil in 88 years, this week. The trip included a third official meeting with Raúl Castro as well as an unprecedented, for Cuba, Q&A with reporters after the meeting. Read more about the trip in the New York Times. Read more about why relations between the US and Cuba have been so hostile for so long in Vox.

Endangering a Species – Donald Trump is on the verge of two things once thought to be impossible: winning the Republican presidential nomination, and putting Republicans’ historically large House majority in danger. The House GOP’s leading indicators — its most vulnerable members — are already sounding the alarm against Trump and his rhetoric on women, Hispanics and other groups. Read more in Politico.

Know Your Audience – In 2014, the NSF promised Congress that it would do a better job of describing the projects it funds. Since then, NSF program officers have been paying more attention to the titles that researchers submit with their grant proposals, and that additional scrutiny is paying off. Projects funded in 2015 are more than twice as likely to sport new titles as those funded in 2012, according to a new analysis by an internal NSF working group. Read more in Science.

Pay Up – A new report indicates promising student loan repayment trends. The Department’s office of Federal Student Aid unveiled new, expanded data on the $357 billion Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program, which typically consists of federal student loans originated by banks. Hardship deferments, delinquencies have fallen and forbearance have declined. Read more at ED or read the Quarterly Student Aid report here.

Dead Lock – The Supreme Court issued a deadlocked ruling Tuesday, its first since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The court tied 4-4 in a case involving whether a pair of wives should be held financially responsible for the failure of their husbands’ real estate endeavor. Read more in The Hill. Meanwhile, what does that mean? What happens when the Supreme Court has a tie? Read more in Slate.

Ancient Battle – The Republican front-runner, billionaire Donald Trump, will be 70 years old on Election Day, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic favorite, will be 69. If they win their parties’ respective nominations, no pair atop the ballot will have been older, on average, since the nation’s founding. Read more in The Hill.

What’s in a Name? – The UK’s National Environmental Research Council went to the wild world of the internet to find a name for its new $300 million Antarctic research vessel. The internet has spoken and Boaty McBoatface is winning by a clear margin. The exercise has been so popular, the site has crashed. Read more at I F*cking Love Science.

House Budget Crunch, Appropriators Roll On

Posted on March 22, 2016

Originally, House Republicans had planned this short work week as one to adopt the FY 2017 budget blueprint passed by the House Budget Committee last week. Passing a FY 2017 budget, despite the two year budget agreement reached last year, was to reinforce the Republican base and broadly that Republicans can rise above and lead in Washington. Instead, the House will adjourn Wednesday for a two-week-plus Easter recess with little to show for their efforts.

When the House returns to work April 12, they will have only four legislative days left to adopt a budget by the statutory deadline of April 15. While House leadership hopes to use the recess to get a deal, the signs have been far from promising. Last week, House Budget Committee approved the plan by a 20-16 vote, with two Republicans joining all 14 Democrats in opposition.

The conservative House Freedom Caucus remains opposed to the Committee-passed FY 2017 Budget plan because it has a discretionary spending cap of $1.07 billion, which is $30 billion above what would be allowed under the deficit-cutting Budget Control Act, which was enacted in 2011. Instead, the FY 2017 House Budget uses a higher limit was first negotiated under a two-year bipartisan budget deal enacted last year under former-Speaker John Boehner.

House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-GA) had tried to broker a compromise to the higher discretionary levels by coupling the additional $30 billion in discretionary funding with consideration of separate legislation that would cut entitlement programs by $30 billion over two years. However, House Conservatives refused the offer and expressed skepticism that any legislation containing entitlement cuts would ever pass, particularly in the filibuster-prone Senate. Additionally, House Democrats denounced the effort to cut entitlements such as Medicare as a betrayal of last year’s bipartisan deal.

Strong and public opposition by the Freedom Caucus has forced House Republican leadership to postpone a House floor vote, knowing they lack the 218 votes needed to ensure its success — nearly with all House Democrats and nearly forty Freedom Caucus members in opposition.

While the House Republican leadership remains hopeful at brokering a budget deal, a lesser version of an official budget, known as a deeming resolution, would set a simple topline discretionary spending limits could be used and would allow the Appropriations committees to ascertain their discretionary spending limits known as 302(b)s for the 12 respective, annual appropriations bills. However, a deeming resolution would likely need support from Democrats to pass.

Meanwhile, given the budget agreement reached least year, an official FY 2017 budget is unnecessary for topline, overall spending levels, but the discretionary spending levels for the individual 12 respective appropriations bills remain in question, which is the reason for the FY 2017 budget.

There has been discussion about proceeding to the annual appropriations bills without any enforceable spending limits, such as an official budget or a deeming resolution. However, doing so is unprecedented .

Meanwhile, House Appropriators are moving forward without an official FY 2017 Budget and released the text of the FY 2017 Military Construction-VA bill today. The measure provides $81.6 billion in discretionary funding. The bill provides $7.9 billion for military construction projects and $176.1 billion in mandatory and discretionary funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Markup of the bill is scheduled for Wednesday by the Military Construction-VA Subcommittee and will kick off legislative action on the 12 appropriations for FY 2017.

House Clears Aviation Extension, Short-term Relief for FAA Reauth

Posted on March 22, 2016

On Monday night, the House cleared a measure that would extend aviation programs through July 15, 2016, giving Congress another three and a half months for the two chambers to seek an agreement on a long-term reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Procedurally, the House concurred with a Senate amendment to the short-term extension (HR 4721) the House had passed on March 21. The original House measure extended aviation programs through July 15, 2016, but included revenue-raising provisions through March 31, 2017. On March 17, the Senate amended HR 4721 to extend both aviation programs and revenue provisions through July 15 of this year.

The current authorization FAA reauthorization is set to expire March 31. Enacting this extension gives Congress over three months to reach a long-term agreement literally just before lawmakers leave for the presidential nominating conventions and the August recess.

Already the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has approved HR 4441 a six-year, $69 billion measure in February and the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has marked up S 2658, a $33.1 billion bill that would authorize the programs through FY 2017 in March.