Washington Update

Problematic Amendments Removed from National Defense Authorization Act

This week, the House Rules Committee considered over 1,200 amendments to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), including the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act and the DETERRENT Act. NAICU joined the higher education community in sending comments to the committee’s leadership urging them to oppose including the amendments in the NDAA.

Both amendments, which would negatively affect private, nonprofit colleges and universities, were ultimately ruled out of order and will not advance with the underlying NDAA bill.

The Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act would require private colleges paying the endowment tax to pay the full federal costs of former students’ federal student loans to pay for an expansion of the Pell Grant program to short-term training programs. This bill was quickly introduced and approved by the House Education and Workforce Committee with a slightly different offset, last December.  It was then scheduled for floor consideration earlier this year but was ultimately pulled from the calendar after significant opposition indicated the bill did not have the votes to pass.

The DETERRENT Act mirrors the bill that passed the House in December 2023, by a bipartisan vote. The amendment would lower the institutional reporting threshold for foreign gift reporting from $250,000 to $0 for countries of concern (China, Iran, North Korea and Russia), and to $50,000 for all other countries, along with additional reporting and disclosures from research and endowment-tax paying institutions.

 

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