What the Sequester Means for Education
Virginia Space Grant Consortium
What the Sequester Means for Education
Prepared for Triangle Coalition for Science and Technology Education by Washington Partners, LLC
Despite the implementation of sequestration, Washington, DC is still here. But it is showing a bit of wear and tear. As was much written about and discussed, one week ago, on March 1, the sequestration that enacts automatic spending cuts across the federal government took effect. Since then, education advocates have been scrambling for information on what that really means. Sequestration was such an abstract concept and a consequence so severe that many hoped it would not come to pass.
Now that the sequester has been triggered, agencies have two months to develop a clear path forward under the across-the-board cuts. There is new information daily regarding how each individual agency will apply reductions. As for programs administered by the Department of Education (ED), such as Title I funds for poor schools and districts, and campus-based aid programs for college students, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent letters to governors this week letting them know what to expect in terms of program cuts. Since many of the programs that affect K-12 education are forward funded, the cuts will not affect these programs until the allocations that are scheduled for July—meaning the cuts will affect resources for the 2013-2014 school year, and not the current one. For the competitive grant programs the agency oversees, current grantees won’t see any cuts. Cuts will come out of FY 2013 (the current fiscal year) funds, but the plan is not to cut continuation grants from multi-year grants but to reduce funding for new grants or contracts. After some analysis, there are those in the education community that assert that the reductions in K-12 spending will be particularly painful in North Dakota, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho and South Dakota—the five states that rely most heavily on federal education money.
As for higher education programs, ED has no authority to waive or change the campus-based allocation formulas that drive awards. Additional guidance for TEACH grants is coming, and College Access Challenge Grants are subject to the sequester-required 5.1 percent cut, since that is a program funded by mandatory dollars. For the TRIO programs, ED expects every grant to be cut by 5 percent. Student loan borrowers will also be affected almost immediately, since loan origination fees on federal direct loans will increase for new loans disbursed after March 1. For Stafford loans, the fee will increase from 1 percent to 1.051 percent; for PLUS loans, the fee will increase from 4.0 percent to 4.24 percent. Over at the National Science Foundation (NSF), it has been announced that cuts will affect future awardees—in that there will be fewer of them. Current grants shouldn’t be affected. Those institutions that receive significant federal dollars for research programs and other efforts from NSF and other agencies should be checking in directly with those agencies.
From a more practical perspective, the advocates in Washington, DC that are on Capitol Hill trying to address the cuts and support better futures for federal investments in education are already directly affected by the cuts. The meetings and discussions are hard enough, but this week it was announced that the sequester means that there will not be enough Capitol Police to man all of the entrances to the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings, and fewer of them will be open. That means longer lines. On the upside, longer lines are powerful motivators.