Spotlight on appropriations. Everything is going smoothly, as usual… ;) Senate Appropriations. Last Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee finally decided on what they are allocating to each of their 12 FY 2020 appropriations bills —these are known as the 302(b) allocations. They were extremely stingy with the FY 2020 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill — essentially freezing funding at FY 2019 levels. The vote was along party lines, with Democrats voting against. Appropriations ranking member Leahy (D-VT) had offered alternative allocations for all of the appropriations bills that would have provided $3.3 billion more for the Labor-HHS-Education bill. It was not approved. OK, technically the bill did get an increase: a whopping $223 million, or 0.1%. But this is the smallest percentage increase provided for any of the 12 appropriations bills, even though 30% of all non-defense discretionary (NDD) funding comes out of this bill. But wait: Didn’t Congress make a deal that added $27 billion for NDD in FY 2020? If practically none of that into the Labor-HHS-Education bill, where did it go? One quarter went to the Commerce-Justice-Science bill and another one quarter to the Military Construction-VA bill ($3.6 billion of which was to replace the FY 2019 funding that the Administration recently transferred from military construction projects to build a border wall). The remaining was mostly divided up between Transportation-HUD and Homeland Security (each of which got increases of more than $3 billion), and Energy and Water (which got $2 billion). The other seven bills got increases of less than $1 billion. Bottom line for adult ed and every other education program that got proposed increases in the House bill is that this is obviously going to make it tougher to end up with a compromise bill that includes those increases. Of course, at the point all we have from the Senate is the stingy overall allocation, not an actual Labor-HHS-Education bill that shows which programs get what. Anyway, CEF is writing a letter to all Senators asking the Senate to revise the allocations to provide at least its proportional share of the net $27 billion increase in NDD funding that Congress enacted for FY 2020. This has been THE major message point for CEF since the deal was made: that it's only fair to give the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill a percentage share of the NDD increase that is proportional to the amount of NDD funding (30%, as noted above) that comes out of that bill. I'll share the letter when it is finalized. Remember also that the House Labor-HHS-Education spending bill passed BEFORE the budget deal that raised the caps for FY 2020 and FY 2021. The House hopefully assumed that the cap deal would have more for NDD than it ultimately did, and provided a very large increase for their bill. In other words, their bill was always going to come in way higher than the Senate bill anyway. But the gap is even wider than we had hoped. What’s Next. The only Senate appropriations bills that have been approved are the Defense and the Energy and Water funding bills, which were approved on Thursday. The Transportation-HUD, Agriculture, and Financial Services bills are scheduled for subcommittee markup tomorrow and full Committee markup on Thursday. According to CEF, it’s unclear whether the Senate will be able to get the 60 votes needed to bring any of the bills to the floor given the allocations, which Democrats do not support. Meanwhile, the House is planning to vote this week on a continuing resolution (CR) to extend current funding reportedly through November 21. Lots of people thinking this may run into trouble, however, as the Administration wants it to include new funding for some of its priorities, including, of course, authorization for new border wall construction. Thanks as always to CEF, from which the bulk of this info is obtained. Jeff Jeff Carter Cell: (202) 374-4387 | @jeffcrtr Senior Policy Advisor National Coalition for Literacy www.national-coalition-literacy.org <http://www.national-coalition-literacy.org/> jcarter@literacypolicy.org <mailto:jcarter@literacypolicy.org> Immediate Past President, Committee for Education Funding Executive Director Physicians for Social Responsibility 1111 14th St, NW, Suite 700 Washington, DC 20005 www.psr.org <http://www.psr.org/> | jcarter@psr.org <mailto:jcarter@psr.org>