Government Relations: More, Please

By Mark F. Smith

The budget and appropriations process has become an annual embarrassment over the past decade, with Congress routinely failing to complete action by the end of the fiscal year. The result has been a series of continuing resolutions followed by huge omnibus bills whose details overwhelm members at the end of the session. New committee leaders in both houses have vowed to make changes and return to some semblance of fiscal discipline.

In some respects, the new committee chairs have succeeded. For the first time in several years, Congress actually passed a Budget Resolution, which sets overall spending parameters; detailed spending decisions are made by appropriations subcommittees in each house. Unfortunately, however, a combination of political and structural factors may yet derail the process. When Congress finishes action on spending bills, higher education programs may end up like the Charles Dickens character Oliver Twist, who begged, “Please, sir, I want some more,” after a too-small serving of workhouse gruel.

For years, the two houses each operated through thirteen identical appropriations subcommittees that had authority over particular federal departments. This year, the expansion of cabinet departments under the Bush administration led to a reorganization. The result is that the Senate will pass twelve appropriations bills and the House eleven. (The discrepancy between the houses arose because the House incorporated District of Columbia appropriations within another subcommittee and then assigned Legislative Branch appropriations to the full committee.) Since both houses of Congress must pass identical texts for the bills to become law, this new structure guarantees that more funding decisions will be made in conference over omnibus bills since some bills will have to combined in order to reach agreement between the houses.

The reduction in the number of subcommittees has made the most difference in the House, which passed all eleven appropriations bills before leaving for the July 4 recess. The Senate completed work on three bills before the recess.

Support for higher education programs is spread across the government. The most important bill for higher education, however, is the Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), Education, and Related Agencies bill, which funds the Department of Education. It provides aid to students and institutions of higher education, precollege programs, and the National Institutes of Health.

The bill the House passed increases the maximum Pell Grant award by $50, to $4,050, half of what the president asked for in February and the first increase in three years. The AAUP favors an immediate increase to $4,500 and a doubling of that figure over the next five years. Although there are strong supporters of this expansion in the Senate, the outlook does not look promising for even this inadequate increase.

Because of the structure of the appropriations process, increases in higher education programs come at the expense of other programs within the Labor-HHS-Education bill. For example, when the House voted to restore funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for popular programming, some of the initial offset came from higher education programs. Efforts in the House to restore this funding at the expense of tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers were prevented from coming to a vote. The full Senate is expected to consider higher education funding in the early fall. The problem is that little funding will remain after Congress addresses the competing political pressures for spending on military and homeland security programs, tax cuts, and the resulting increased deficits.

Since the establishment in 1862 of the land-grant system to finance higher education, federal support for it has proven to be an investment with a strong return. Continued federal initiatives, such as the GI Bill and the Higher Education Act, have enabled millions of students to attend college. But in the last thirty years, the burden of funding higher education has shifted more and more to the student. On average, the maximum Pell Grant today covers 68 percent of the cost of a community college, 41 percent of the cost of a public four-year institution, and only 16 percent of the cost of a private, not-for-profit institution. This trend will lead to higher education being perceived less as the public good it once was, and increasingly as a private good, which students must sacrifice to afford. This trend must be resisted.

Mark Smith is AAUP director of government relations.

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