Congress Approves Final 2006 Spending Plan for Student Aid and NIH Research

By JEFFREY BRAINARD

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Congress completed work late Wednesday night on a $602-billion spending bill for education and health programs in 2006 that would freeze spending on most federal student-aid programs and provide a small increase for the National Institutes of Health.

But Congress was also expected today to finish work on a separate measure, setting the Defense Department's budget for the 2006 fiscal year, that would reduce spending on those and most other federal programs by 1 percent across the board (see accompanying article). That decrease would bring about the largest cuts in years to many programs that benefit academe, and many college officials viewed the overall spending package as dismal.

The Senate passed the education-and-health bill on a voice vote. The bill now goes to President Bush for his signature.

Despite their strong opposition to the bill, Democrats agreed to allow it to pass on a voice vote after they were persuaded that the alternative -- a yearlong continuing resolution, which at best would maintain spending at 2005 levels in the education and health agencies -- would be less generous to the programs they favored. The spending legislation covers the 2006 fiscal year, which began nearly three months ago. Since then, the affected agencies have operated under a series of continuing resolutions.

The U.S. House of Representatives already approved the education-and-health bill last week by a razor-thin margin, 215 to 213. That represented a turnaround from a vote last month in which the House rejected a version of the same bill by 224 to 209. Last week, Congressional negotiators tweaked the bill and added $90-million for health programs in rural areas, and that step won over several House Republicans from rural districts who had voted no on the earlier version.

But for the rural funds, the final version of the bill was almost identical to the version rejected earlier by the House. No House Democrat voted for either version of the bill.

The bill would provide a maximum Pell Grant award of $4,050, the same level as in the past three years. The maximum award would not be affected by the 1-percent cut. In proposals made earlier this year, the House and Mr. Bush had sought to raise the maximum award to $4,100, but the Senate supported no increase. The 1-percent cut will, however, reduce the amount of funds for other federal student-aid programs, like the GEAR UP and TRIO programs that help needy students attend college.

Under the education-and-health bill, the budget for the National Institutes of Health, the largest source of funds for university research, would rise by only about 0.5 percent, or a net increase of $150-million, to $28.62-billion. That was in line with the earlier proposals by the House and Mr. Bush, but the Senate had supported an increase of $1-billion.

However, the 1-percent cut would more than exceed the approved increase, and that had researchers worried. It would be the first reduction in the agency's appropriations since 1964. The agency is expecting to finance at least 500 fewer new grants and competitively awarded renewals in 2006 than the 10,020 given in the 2004 fiscal year.

The tight numbers are the result of Republican leaders' efforts to control the growth of federal spending. Early in this year's budget process, they allocated a sum for "discretionary" spending -- or spending not set automatically by law -- in the education-and-health bill that was $1.4-billion, or 1 percent, less than in 2005.

With the further cut of 1 percent approved by Congress this week, a decrease that applies to all federal discretionary spending, the reduction in the education-and-health bill would grow to $2.8-billion, or 2 percent. Members of the Appropriations Committees in Congress said they had struggled to juggle competing priorities within the bill, which also provides money for schools and for the winter heating bills of low-income people.

Before the final bill was approved, Democrats in the House and the Senate lashed out at proposals, approved this month by the House, to cut federal taxes by $95-billion over five years. Democrats said the cuts would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers and were wrong, considering the constraints of the education-and-health bill.

Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who helped write the spending bill, said it had turned out in a way that "only the Grinch could love" and was "a very cruel present to the very poorest people in America."

Joining him in expressing concern about the bill was Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who is one of the NIH's champions in Congress. Mr. Specter, who leads an Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the NIH's spending, took the unusual step of criticizing the education-and-health bill that he had helped craft. But he called its spending levels "grossly inadequate."

Mr. Specter's counterpart in the House, Rep. Ralph Regula, an Ohio Republican, responded to Democratic critics in that chamber by saying that "there are a lot of things that were unusual this year, with [Hurricane] Katrina and with other challenges, and what we have tried to do is do the best we can with what was available, and I think we have done some pretty positive things." Mr. Regula also called the proposed tax cuts an unrelated issue.

Among other details, all subject to the 1-percent across-the-board cut, the health-and-education bill would:

• Provide no money for NIH grants to colleges and other institutions to build research facilities, unlike in previous years. Congress appropriated $119-million for that purpose in 2004. President Bush sought $30-million in 2006, but only for construction of "biocontainment" laboratories to study dangerous infectious diseases.

• Cut by 69 percent the Health Professions program, which works to train students from minority groups and disadvantaged backgrounds to be physicians, dentists, and other health professionals to work in low-income communities. The bill would provide $248.6-billion for the program, $88-million over Mr. Bush's request. Jordan J. Cohen, departing president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, predicted in a written statement that the cut would "decimate" the program and "seriously impair federal efforts to increase the supply and diversity of the health-care work force and provide access to quality health care for all segments of the population."

• Sustain the 2005 level of funds for several other higher-education programs, including $836.5-million for the TRIO programs for disadvantaged students; $306.5-million for GEAR UP, which helps low-income elementary and secondary students to prepare for and attend college; and $990.3-million for federal work-study. The bill also would preserve the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education program, which provides funds to community colleges for career programs, and give it $1.309-billion.

• Allocate a total of $13.177-billion for the Pell Grant Program, an increase of 6.6 percent. That amount includes an additional $4.3-billion to pay off the program's estimated shortfall.

• Allot $125-million for a new job-training program proposed by President Bush, intended to help community colleges train workers for fast-growing fields like health care and information technology. That amount is half of the $250-million that the project requested. Language previously approved by the House would broaden eligibility for the program, which the administration had limited to community colleges, to include career centers.

• Turn down the president's request for an additional $125-million for a program to support community colleges' dual-enrollment programs, which allow high-school students to take college-level courses for credit.

• Spend $184-million, an increase of $5.4-million, on the Education Department's Math and Science Partnerships. That program provides money to math and science faculty members at colleges to train schoolteachers to improve their instruction and knowledge in those fields. It would complement a related program with the same name run by the National Science Foundation.

To free up money for other needs, lawmakers stripped the bill of all earmarks. Those noncompetitive awards, sometimes called pork-barrel spending, are directed by members of Congress to favored constituents, including colleges, for research and other purposes. In recent years, lawmakers have included millions of dollars in academic earmarks in the bill -- about $300-million in 2003 alone.

Mr. Specter explained last month in a written statement that he supported removing all earmarks from the bill partly as a way to prod House leaders to agree to put more money into the bill in 2007.

"A great many important projects will have to be deferred for a year," said Mr. Specter, who has used his position to secure large helpings of earmarks for colleges in Pennsylvania. "Among many tough choices in this job, this is the toughest one I have made in my tenure in the Senate."

Stephen Burd contributed to this article.

• With Money Tight, Budget-Bill Surprises Keep College Lobbyists on Alert (11/16/2005)

• House Panel Approves $15-Billion Cut in Student-Loan Programs (11/4/2005)

• Senate Approves Spending Bill for Pell Grants and NIH (10/28/2005)

• Senate Appropriators Propose a Flat Pell Award and a 3.7% Gain for the NIH in 2006 (7/13/2005)