By Della Cronin

The New Year has not brought bipartisanship or harmony to Capitol Hill. To kick off 2018, Members of Congress and the White House engaged in battles over federal funding, immigration, the infamous wall, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and a healthcare market stabilization deal. The results so far? A short government shutdown in January that ultimately resulted in another temporary spending deal and a pledge from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that he and his colleagues would work toward a vote on an immigration bill. The next deadline in this drama is February 8th, when the most recent temporary spending bill expires. Given the number of unknowns that could affect the ability to negotiate a deal on spending and immigration, such as the content and tone of the President’s January 30th State of the Union Address, polling numbers in a mid-term election year, and White House, for example, it is difficult to predict the endgame, but the education community still hopes for a final deal that raises caps for domestic spending in FY 2018 and FY 2019.

In other news, in a White House meeting in January, President Donald Trump basically urged his congressional colleagues to revive earmarks—the practice of identifying local needs that warrant federal investments and fighting for them in the 12 annual spending bills. He clearly subscribes to the familiar theory that the elimination of the practice has contributed to the dysfunction on Capitol Hill and increased partisanship. (When earmarks were common practice, state delegations worked together more frequently, regardless of party affiliation, to win funds for their constituents, as did all members of the spending panels, who wanted to see the bills they worked on enacted as they wrote them.) Congress may agree. The House Rules Committee held two hearings on the issue; that hearing suggested that the House may try to revive and revised earmark process in a would-be transportation and infrastructure bill. It goes without saying that the education community would welcome a revival of the practice, which had historically supported local school and afterschool facility construction, investments in STEM programs and teacher professional development, among many other local educational needs.

In the Senate, it was announced that newly-arrived Senators Tina Smith (D-MN) and Doug Jones (D-AL) will sit on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, where they will have the ability to weigh in on the pending reauthorizations of both the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act and the Higher Education Act (HEA). There have been two hearings on the latter already this year. In December, the House Education and the Workforce Committee approved a partisan HEA reauthorization plan, and Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-WA) have been working on a bipartisan Senate proposal, which was encouraging news until Senator Murray told the press that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s work on implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which Senator Murray finds woefully deficient, could adversely affect those bipartisan efforts. Meanwhile, in the House, Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) has said she’d like to see the HEA bill her panel passed in December on the House floor as soon as possible. Her Democratic colleague, Ranking Member Bobby Scott (R-VA) is working on an alternative to that plan that preserves current law’s investments in teacher preparation programs and other educator supports, which the Foxx plan would eliminate. Representative Scott will undoubtedly offer his vision for HEA on the floor, if the bill is subject to a House vote this year.

While NCTM and others are watching all of these developments closely, the next policy development that will have advocates scrambling will be the release of the President’s budget proposal for FY 2019. While the schedule for the annual request is the first week of February, last month the White House said the plan would be delayed at least a week. It is expected to include proposals to cut spending for the Department of Education as the FY 2018 plan did. The Congress—which ultimately decides federal spending levels, no matter what the White House proposes—rejected that plan. NCTM and others in the education community will be asking them to do the same in FY 2019.