Appropriations
House Republicans are planning to slash the Education Department’s budget by at least 15 percent, though Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee say the cuts are closer to 30 percent…
On Friday, 7/14, House Republicans appropriators approved their funding bill for the departments of Commerce and Justice in a subcommittee…
On Friday, 7/14, a House Appropriations subcommittee advanced a $147 billion spending package by voice vote that would slash funding for health agencies and eliminate some altogether…
On Tuesday, 7/11, House Republicans released their fiscal 2024 THUD spending bill, which represents an overall cut of 25 percent below current funding levels when accounting for offsets…
Republicans on a House Appropriations subcommittee advanced a spending bill on Thursday, 7/13, to slash fiscal 2024 budgets for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Interior Department…
On Thursday, 7/13, Senate appropriators unanimously approved their fiscal 2024 bill to fund the Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Services (IRS) and other agencies, sending the $16.9 billion measure to the floor…
California
California may make it harder to ban books in public schools — as it dives into the contentious, national debate pitting the First Amendment against conservative values…
President and Administration
In 2019, residents of Evanston, a city just north of Chicago, committed to spend $10 million over 10 years on local reparations for Black residents…
One year after the rollout of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its 988 Lifeline partners announced the addition of Spanish text and chat services…
Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel is proposing a $200 million program to harden school cybersecurity as major districts struggle to recover from targeted attacks that have occurred since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic…
Applicants for grants from the Department of Health and Human Services would face more scrutiny about their nondiscrimination policies under a proposal announced by HHS’s Office for Civil Rights on Tuesday, 7/11…
In a recent report, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said that the disparity in maternal mortality among Black women compared with white women across nine countries in the Americas is the starkest in the U.S. Black women and girls are three times more likely to die while giving birth or within six weeks of giving birth than non-Afro-descendent and non-Hispanic women, the UNFPA said…
On Friday, 7/14, the Department of Education began notifying more than 804,000 borrowers that they have a total of $39 billion in Federal student loans that will be automatically discharged in the coming weeks…
According to provisional data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of people dying of drug overdoses in the U.S. was nearly the same between February 2022 and February 2023 as it was during that period the previous year…
Congress
A subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced the Support for Patients and Communities Reauthorization Act to the full panel via voice vote on Thursday, 7/13…
On Tuesday, 7/11, House Education and Workforce Chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and Ranking Member Bobby Scott (D-VA) unveiled a bipartisan health care package of four bills focused on transparency in health care, including for hospitals and pharmacy benefit managers…
Education
Wisconsin schools reported almost 6,000 seclusion and 7,000 restraint incidents with a majority of the incidents involving students with disabilities during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a report by the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI)…
Oklahoma’s attorney general is preparing to buck some fellow Republicans and challenge the nation’s first public religious charter school…
According to new data, pandemic recovery has essentially stalled for most of the nation’s students, and upper elementary and middle school students actually lost ground this year in reading and math…