The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor-Health and Human Services-Education approved its FY 2024 spending bill with massive cuts across all agencies, including education. For student aid, the bill maintains the current Pell Grant maximum of $7,395, but eliminates funding for Federal Work-Study (FWS) and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (SEOG). If enacted, these cuts would be devastating to low-income students paying for college. 
 
In opening the hearing, Subcommittee Chairman Robert Aderholt (R-AL) said “I don’t pretend this is a perfect bill, no bill in Congress is ever a perfect bill. But we live in difficult times, our nation remains mired in high inflation, which has only been worsened by the massive infusion of government spending, both during and immediately after the COVID pandemic.” He went on to note that 60 programs, including FWS and SEOG, were eliminated because they were either unauthorized or had expired authorizations, and that 50 programs had funding cuts to meet the “challenge of achieving deficit reduction through cuts in spending.”
 
Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) called the bill “shameful, but not surprising” and called out Republicans for wanting to eliminate the Department of Education and ending public K-12 education in America. She derided all proposed cuts and eliminations across the agencies.
 
Overall, the bill provides $147 billion, which is $64 billion less than last year and represents a 28% cut. Department of Education funding is cut by $12 billion.  Despite the bipartisan agreement for funding levels in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the House majority bowed to the demands of the Freedom Caucus to further lower spending allocations for non-defense subcommittees in the FY 2024 process. 
 
The Full Committee on Appropriations is expected to consider the Labor-HHS-Education bill on July 27.
 
Meanwhile in the Senate, Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) and Vice Chair Susan Collins (R-ME) reached an agreement to add $14 billion in emergency funding to the spending cap, with $2 billion of that going to the Labor-HHS-Education Subcommittee. This is in addition to their setting allocations according to the statutory cap, providing $195.23 billion for the Labor-HHS-Education Subcommittee.  While this represents a $48 billion increase over what the House has proposed, it is still $31.7 billion less than FY 2023 funding levels.
 
Murray and Collins have also agreed to use any budgetary mechanism available to provide as much funding as possible in FY 2024. The committee is currently scheduled to mark up its Labor-HHS-Education subcommittee on July 27.