July 13, 2005

The Senate Weighs In

Facing tight budget limits that lawmakers acknowledged required a sea of difficult decisions, a U.S. Senate subcommittee Tuesday found some extra money for biomedical research programs at the National Institutes of Health but declined to raise the maximum Pell Grant.

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The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education unanimously approved legislation for the 2006 fiscal year that would protect virtually all of the student aid programs that President Bush had recommended cutting. The measure would also increase spending on the NIH to $29.415 billion, $905 million more than the president proposed and $1.05 billion more than the agency is receiving this year, and keep intact a slew of small-budget federal programs aimed at training health professionals in underserved areas and high-need fields.

But to the dismay of college lobbyists, the Senate bill would keep the maximum Pell Grant at $4,050 in 2006, $100 below what President Bush proposed and $50 less than a parallel bill (H.R. 3010) approved last month by the House of Representatives would provide. Like the House measure, the Senate bill would wipe out a $4.3 billion shortfall in the Pell program that has undermined the spending power of the grants.

Senators also signaled that their bill will take issue with guidance released by the U.S. Education Department in March on athletics programs’ compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars gender discrimination at institutions that receive federal aid. The department’s guidance said that colleges could fulfill the law’s requirements for ensuring equitable participation for female athletes by giving their students an e-mail survey asking about their sports interests, which advocates for women said would give colleges an easy way out of complying with the law.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a member of the Senate panel, said the committee had agreed to include language about the guidance in the report that accompanies the bill. An aide to Murray said the statement would “clarify the committee’s position on Title IX and the Education Department’s recent guidance,” but declined to say whether it would urge the department to revoke the guidance.

Murray herself, though, left no doubt about her views, saying of the surveys, “I cannot believe that is the correct way to go.”

‘Very Difficult Decisions’

Senators of both parties rued the situation Congress finds itself in this year. Lawmakers approved a budget resolution this spring that significantly increased spending on the military and carved out significant funds to pay for continued tax cuts for Americans. Because of those priorities and a desire to limit other federal spending to avoid increasing the deficit significantly, appropriations subcommittees like the one for education, health and labor programs were given strict limits on what they could spend.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the subcommittee, ruminated on how, when he first came to Congress, legislators fought for seats on appropriations committees because “those were the days when you had money” to give out. Now, he said, the main decisions are “which worthwhile projects are going to be underfunded.”

His Democratic counterpart, Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, said that because of the budget resolution, “the die is cast and we’re forced to make very difficult decisions.” While he described the subcommittee’s measure over all as a “fair bill that reflects the priorities of members on both sides of the aisle,” he also said that “for the first time in a decade, this country will slide backwards on its commitment to students.”

In his budget, President Bush strongly emphasized the Pell Grant, proposing to increase the core program for students from low-income families by $500 over five years and paying for it, in part, by saving money from the student loan programs and slashing funds from a set of other programs important to college administrators and students, including Perkins Loans, Gear Up and TRIO, which help prepare students for a higher education, and vocational education programs, to name several.

With the Senate’s action Tuesday, Congress has clearly repudiated that approach. The Senate joined the House in providing funds for those and other programs that the Bush administration had targeted. The trade off, though, is that the Senate panel’s plan would not have enough left over to increase the maximum Pell Grant in 2006, in part because Specter and Harkin have a long tradition of doing everything possible to increase spending on biomedical research.

“We have scraped out an additional billion dollars for NIH,” Specter said Tuesday.

The Senate bill would also:

• Join the House bill in financing a new community college job training initiative that President Bush has touted at $125 million — half of the $250 million the president requested.
• Restore $250 million that President Bush and the House had proposed cutting from the Health Resources and Services Administration’s health professions programs, which aim to widen the pipeline and improve the training of physicians and other health care workers in urban and rural areas and in fields such as primary care, geriatrics and allied health.
• Increase spending on Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, which supplement Pell Grants for extremely needy students, by $26 million, to $805 million.
• Wipe out new funds for the Perkins Loan Program, which gives colleges money to lend at a fixed low rate to students from low-income families. The Senate bill, like the House measure, would provide $66 million to colleges to forgive the Perkins Loans of students who enter certain high-need teaching or other fields.

The full Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to consider the spending measure for health, education, and labor programs on Thursday.

2006 Spending Plans for Key Education, Health and Job Training Programs

— Doug Lederman

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