The Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee will consider the nomination of Sally Jewell to be the Secretary of the Interior next Thursday, March 7th, at 10:30am ET. The hearing will be webcast live on the Committee’s website, and an archived video will be available shortly after the hearing is complete. Witness testimony will be available on the website at the start of the hearing.
News and updates
Sequestration Likely
Congress returns to work Monday after a week-long recess period. Foremost on their agenda this week will be the sequester, which is set to take effect on Friday unless Congress takes legislative action before then. Barring an extremely unlikely last-minute deal, about $85 billion is set to be cut from military, domestic, and some health-care programs beginning March 1st. Even if Congress decides to replace or delay some cuts during the late March debate on funding government for the remaining seven months of FY 2013, some cuts will certainly go into effect before then.
Sequestration involves trimming $85 billion from a $3.6 trillion annual federal budget, or about 2.4 percent. But the cuts will not affect Social Security or Medicaid, and the Medicare cuts total only about $11 billion in FY 2013. Thus, entitlement spending, which poses the biggest long-term challenge to the federal budget, accounts for only a sliver of the cuts. That leaves more than $70 billion in cuts to be applied over the next seven months to the roughly two-fifths of the budget that is devoted to discretionary spending, including research, education, the military, and dozens of other categories.
NIH Prepares for Sequestration Implementation
As mentioned in our blog post yesterday, NIH Director Francis Collins announced that NIH IC directors will develop their own plans for how to apply sequestration cuts to their institutes and centers. This was followed by NIH’s official notice posted yesterday that due to sequestration, NIH likely will reduce funding levels of non-competing continuation grants, make fewer competing awards, and for continuation awards that have already been made, may not be able to reach the full FY 2013 commitment level described in Notice of Award. Confirming Collins’ announcement, it also states that if sequestration occurs, NIH ICs will announce their individual plans to meet new budget levels. Read the full NIH notice here.
The anticipated cuts are already being seen: PIs are receiving awards sharply reduced from committed levels, forcing universities to make up the difference or find cuts, including letting go lab staff. The sequester is scheduled to take effect just a week from today.
NIH Director Indicates Some Flexibility on Sequester Cut within Institute
NIH Director Francis Collins announced to reporters yesterday after a tour of facilities with Senator Mikulski (D-MD), that he had informed each director of the 27 individual institutes and centers that they will have the authority to determine how to take the looming 5.1% ($1.5 billion) sequester cut to NIH scheduled to take effect on March 1st. Director Collins instructed institute directors “to figure out how to distribute that amongst the many difference kind of mechanisms, grants and centers, in terms of the intramural program, but everything will take a hit.” The NIH will attempt to prioritize things that seem most promising and critical to public health, although there is still expected to be across-the-board damage to virtually everything.
Senator Mikulski indicated that Congress is looking at March 27th when the continuing resolution (CR) expires for a potential sequester fix. According to the Senator, that would create a legislative vehicle “to solve the problem of sequester to get us beyond the CR and to give certainty for this year and then focus on fiscal year ’14 appropriations while the President hopes to seek, with other leadership, a grand bargain.”
Newly Introduced Legislation
A roundup of bills introduced last week that may be of interest to the higher education community:
H.R. 729: A bill to amend the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 to exempt the National Institutes of Health from sequestration under section 251A for fiscal 2013, and to reduce the sequestration by the amount of the exemption.
Sponsor: Jim McDermott (D-WA) Introduced: 2/14/2013 Last Major Action: Referred to House Budget Committee Cosponsors: 2
Link to McDermott Press Release
H.R. 618: A bill to authorize the Secretary of Education to enter into voluntary, flexible agreements with certain guaranty agencies to provide delinquency prevention and default aversion services for borrowers and potential borrowers of Federal Direct Loans under the Higher Education Act of 1965.
Sponsor: Michael Michaud (D-ME) Introduced: 2/12/2013 Last Major Action: Referred to House Committee on Education and the Workforce Cosponsors: 4
S. 370: A bill to improve and expand geographic literacy among kindergarten through grade 12 students in the United States by improving professional development programs for kindergarten through grade 12 teachers offered through institutions of higher education.
Sponsor: Thad Cochran (R-MS) Introduced: 2/14/2013 Last Major Action: Referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Cosponsors: 1
The full text of these bills can be found by searching for their respective bill number at thomas.loc.gov