President Bush and Congress Set to Increase Pell Grants

Rise would be first in 5 years; House also approves more money for research

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By JEFFREY BRAINARD

Washington

Student aid was at the center of a race for one-upmanship here last week between the Democratic leadership in Congress and President Bush.

First, the House of Representatives approved a spending bill for the rest of the 2007 fiscal year that provided a 6 percent, or $260, increase in the maximum Pell Grant award.

Then, just a day later, the secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, announced that Mr. Bush planned to unveil a budget for 2008 this week that calls for the biggest increase in the grant program for low-income students in a generation: The maximum award would rise by nearly 14 percent, or $550, next year, and by 33 percent, or $1,350, over the next five years.

The president's sudden interest in raising the maximum Pell Grant — which has been stuck at $4,050 since 2002, while its purchasing power has been eroded by inflationcomes after the Democrats made the program and the issue of college affordability a central plank in their campaign platform to retake Congress last fall.

Student aid was not the only beneficiary in the spending bill passed by new Democratic House last week. Programs benefiting higher education received some of the largest increases in the 2007 fiscal year, which ends September 30, while most federal programs would get no more than their 2006 levels.

The news was not entirely rosy for colleges, though: To free up money for other priorities, Democratic leaders proposed a one-year moratorium on earmarks, the controversial appropriations steered by members of Congress to constituents for specific projects. That could deprive colleges of as much as $2-billion.

After the House approved the spending bill (H.J. Res. 20), by a vote of 286 to 140, the measure moved to the Senate, which is under pressure to pass it by February 15. Congress adjourned its last session in December, under Republican control, without finishing most of the annual appropriations bills that finance the federal government, and a temporary spending measure is in place only until that date.

After the Democrats took control of Congress in January, the party's leaders said they wanted to quickly finish a spending plan for 2007 to allow them to consider the president's budget for 2008.

The spending bill for 2007, which totals $463.5-billion, would speed up the slow growth in spending for scientific research in recent years.

The research budget of the National Science Foundation would rise by nearly 8 percent, to $4.7-billion, and spending for the Energy Department's Office of Science would rise by about 6 percent, to $3.8-billion.

What's more, spending for the National Institutes of Health, the largest source of funds for university research, would grow by 2.1 percent, to $28.9-billion.

Democrats and college lobbyists have also argued that the federal government should increase Pell Grants to help students cope with rising tuition. In the 2005-6 school year, the Pell award covered just 33 percent of the average cost of tuition, fees, and room and board at a four-year public institution, according to the College Board. In 2001-2, the Pell covered 42 percent of those costs. Twenty years ago, it was nearly 60 percent.

The idea of increasing research budgets at the National Science Foundation and Energy Department has developed a broad base of support among members of both parties as well as industry and academic leaders. President Bush proposed doubling spending over a decade on physical-sciences research at those agencies beginning in the 2007 fiscal year, as part of a plan he called the American Competitiveness Initiative. Mr. Bush and other advocates for that research spending say it is vital to preserve America's global lead in the development of lucrative, technology-based products.

The proposed increase for the National Institute of Health, totaling $620-million, would strengthen the power of the agency's director to influence grant-making but also give a small raise to the agency's 27 autonomous institutes and centers.

That increase would lag behind the inflation rate projected for this year for biomedical-research costs. Nonetheless, "I think most people were girding for a year of flat funding," said Jon Retzlaff, director of legislative relations for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, so the increase represents "a real victory."

The NIH increase would help the agency, to award about 1,000 additional research-project grants this year, for a total of roughly 10,000 new grants. That would reverse a decline in recent years.

To help provide more new grants, the NIH had announced in December that it was canceling inflationary increases for grants awarded in previous years. The Democrats' plan does not reverse that announcement but does provide money for about half of the 1,000 new grants.

Another portion of the proposed NIH increase would help the agency raise the number of scientists receiving their first-ever grants by 1,500.

In effect, about half of the $620-million increase would go to the NIH's director's office, which could prove controversial in some quarters of academe. Part of this money would finance a program called the Roadmap for Medical Research, which supports interdisciplinary research projects.

That effort, begun in 2003, has been criticized by some scientists as diverting money from traditional biomedical-research projects at universities during a period when the percentage of grant applications approved by the NIH has steadily dropped because of tight budgets. Supporters of the program, including the agency's director, Elias A. Zerhouni, have said the program is essential to translating advances in fundamental biomedical research into new medical treatments.

Under the Democrats' plan, the Roadmap project would get a net spending increase of about 46 percent over the 2006 level.

The rest of the NIH's increase would in effect provide an increase of at least 1 percent for the institutes and centers. Until now, they have contributed that proportion of their annual appropriations to finance the Roadmap program.

Another portion of the NIH's increase, $69-million, is specifically to begin a major academic study on children's health, the National Children's Study, that President Bush proposed to cut.

That effort would track the health of 100,000 children from birth to adulthood in a search for cures for autism, diabetes, and other diseases that can strike in childhood.

Earmarks Live On

Higher-education leaders were bracing for the effect of the plan's one-year moratorium on earmarks. But some educators also held out hope that some projects financed through earmarks in the past might still get some federal dollars this year.

To pay for their top priorities, appropriations-committee leaders raided some of the funds set aside in last year's spending bills for earmarks, the controversial, noncompetitive awards directed by members of Congress to universities and other constituents. Congress provided more than $2-billion in earmarks to 716 universities and colleges in the 2003 fiscal year, the last for which The Chronicle calculated a grand total.

Critics of earmarks call them "pork-barrel spending" and say they generally support efforts of dubious quality, including, in some cases, scientific research, laboratory construction, and other campus projects. But supporters of earmarks call them the only way to carry out good ideas overlooked by federal agencies.

Fulfilling the hopes of some university officials, the Democrats' plan does not prohibit federal agencies from choosing voluntarily to continue financing previously earmarked projects, a Congressional staff member said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Energy Department's Office of Science, for example, would retain the $130-million appropriated for research earmarks in 2006.

President Bush proposed in his State of the Union address last month that earmarked spending be cut in half, not eliminated, the staff member pointed out, adding that "the president can choose the ones he thinks are worthwhile" to save.

Federal agencies will have to balance conflicting priorities in deciding whether to spend their limited funds in 2007 on earmarked projects. The proposed plan provides only half the money needed for a scheduled pay raise of 2 percent for federal workers, and no money to cover increases in other operating costs, like rent.

Democratic leaders have said that appropriations bills for 2008 will again contain earmarks, but at about half the level of 2006, as the president suggested.

Agriculture Funds Saved

The bill's treatment of earmarks for agriculture research also gave university officials some cheer: it would shift $185-million earmarked in 2006 in the Department of Agriculture's Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service's budget to the service's other, nonearmarked research accounts. Over all, the service's budget would get no increase over 2006.

Most of the redistributed money would go to the service's Hatch Act program, which distributes funds to land-grant institutions according to a population-based formula.

Some land-grant universities will be hurt under this plan: those that got more money through earmarks in 2006 than from other department programs like the Hatch Act funds.

In another provision benefiting academe, the plan would finance the Survey of Income and Program Participation. This federal survey is considered the nation's only large-scale, longitudinal source of data on poverty, unemployment, and disability and on the impact of government programs on households. The program had been selected for elimination under President Bush's budget plan for 2007, drawing protests from social scientists who were concerned about the potential loss of the data it collects.

When the bill moves to the Senate, some members have vowed to try to amend it. But they appear unlikely to succeed: More spending cannot be added to the bill without violating agreed-upon caps. And any substantial reworking of the bill could delay final approval past February 15, triggering a shutdown of the federal government.