Senate Passes Stopgap Spending Measure, Lawmakers Leave Town

The Senate finally approved a stopgap measure to pay for the government’s activities for six more months in the wee hours of Saturday morning, and lawmakers went home, The Washington Post reports. After a procedural vote delayed the work that a bickering Congress hoped to finish on Thursday, the Senate approved, 62 to 30, a measure to pay for the government beyond September 30, the end of the fiscal year, avoiding a government shutdown right before the election. Although the original Senate version would have restored a pathway for students without high-school diplomas to receive federal aid, and the House version would have prevented the Department of Education from enforcing the gainful-employment requirement of the Higher Education Act, those provisions were absent from the compromise that was passed and will have to wait until Congress resumes after the election.

Filed under: Government, Student Debt, Students