As we shared last week, the federal government was reopened with a Continuing Resolution (CR) and the debt limit was raised under legislation (H.R. 2775) passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. Per this agreement, a budget conference committee was created to develop a longer term FY14 budget. The committee was recently announced and is composed of the entire Senate Budget Committee along with four House Republicans and three House Democrats. The bipartisan, bicameral group is led respectively by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) who have been charged with negotiating an agreement between the House and Senate budgets— a $90 billion difference that will need to be reconciled and likely include broader issues such as tax and entitlement reform in a final deal.
Sequestration also is looming in the background of these negotiations, with the FY14 sequester cuts from the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) set to go into effect by mid-January, the same time the current CR is set to expire. These additional sequester cuts would lower the aggregate spending cap for the federal budget to $967 billion and trigger further across-the-board spending cuts to the federal budget. Both sides have recently voiced interest in replacing, or at the very least mitigating, these cuts. However, Democrats favor increasing revenues to pay for additional spending beyond the $967 billion level, while Republicans are seeking reductions to entitlements and broad-based tax reform to offset those costs.
The conference committee set its first meeting for Wednesday October 30th to begin talks on these topics. As we have shared previously, sequestration has adversely effected and continues to negatively impact the CTE community. It is critical that NASDCTEc and its partners in the CTE community continue to engage their members of Congress, especially those on this conference committee, as they grapple with these important issues. Please check our blog for updates as this process continues to unfold.
New Addition to OVAE and Third Round of TAACCCT Grants Announced
With the federal government reopened, the Department of Education and its Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) are getting back to normal operations. Mark Mitsui, the recently appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Community Colleges at OVAE, announced a new section for community colleges in the OVAE Connections newsletter. The section will, “provide useful information to community college leaders and their campus communities regarding relevant federal policy, grants and research.†Feedback and input for the new community college section can be sent directly to: ovaenewsletter@ed.gov
The third round of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) Grant Program just finished and approximately $474.5 million in grants are set to go out to community colleges and universities across the country. The four-year, $2 billion initiative, jointly administered by the Department of Labor and the Department of Education, funds the development and expansion of career training programs that are linked to the needs of business and industry. The grant program also invests in staff and educational resources and supports access to free digital learning materials. As Labor Secretary Thomas Perez noted, “These investments in demand-driven skills training bring together education, labor, business and community leaders to meet the real-world needs of the changing global marketplace.â€
More information on TAACCCT can be found here and a list of grantees by state, along with project descriptions, can be found here.
Steve Voytek, Government Relations AssociateÂ