On Monday, the House Appropriations Committee released the text for Fiscal Year (FY) 2020’s Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill ahead of the subcommittee mark-up scheduled today. The bill reportedly proposes an additional $37.4 million in FY 2020 for the Perkins Basic State Grant program, which would be approximately a 3% increase over FY 2019 enacted levels, potentially bringing the total appropriation level for the Perkins Basic State Grant program to around $1.3 billion. In comparison, the President’s budget request would have level-funded Perkins at $1.263 billion for FY 2020. However, while the House proposed CTE increase is higher than the level proposed by the President, it is lower than many other education programs in the bill. Overall, discretionary funding for the Department of Education would increase by 6%, or $11.7 billion, in this bill. You can read more details about other program funding levels included in the bill here or view our joint press release with Advance CTE here.
This is just the first step in the congressional appropriations process, and final funding levels for many of the programs in the bill are likely to change as the process moves forward. The next step after subcommittee consideration will be a full committee mark-up, currently scheduled for May 8. Amendments are likely to be considered during that mark-up. Once the full committee marks up and passes the bill, it will then go to the House floor for consideration by the entire House of Representatives, and a similar process will take place in the Senate before final agreement.
Complicating the final passage and agreement between the chambers on funding levels for FY 2020 are the statutory budget caps currently in place on discretionary spending—both for defense and nondefense programs. Congressional leaders are currently in the process of negotiating an increase in these caps, which will be necessary to avoid steep cuts across the federal budget and provide any of the increases suggested by the House. The exact cap agreement will have tremendous influence on the final funding numbers for education programs like Perkins.
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