Senate Republicans moved last week to protect the Pell Grant program and other key education and research funding from deep cuts proposed by the Trump administration, setting up a budget battle with the House in September.In a bipartisan 26-3 vote, the Senate Appropriations Committee advanced its FY 2026 Labor-HHS-Education spending bill, rejecting the administration’s proposal to lower the maximum Pell Grant award from $7,395 to $5,710. The bill maintains $22.5 billion for Pell and preserves funding for TRIO, campus childcare subsidies, and other programs the administration sought to eliminate.
The legislation also increases funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by $400 million, bringing its total base budget to $47.2 billion, and retains existing facilities and administrative (F&A) reimbursement rules. This comes as ACE and other higher education groups are challenging in court the administration’s attempts to cap F&A reimbursements, and as the Joint Associations Group has proposed a simpler, more transparent way to cover the real costs of federally funded research.
The bill further directs the Department of Health and Human Services to notify Congress before making any changes to NIH’s structure, blocking the administration’s proposed restructuring. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health would remain funded at $1.5 billion, the same as FY 2025.
Overall, the Department of Education would receive $79 billion, significantly more than the $66.7 billion requested by the administration.
“We are not surprised by what we’ve seen. The Senate often works more bipartisanly together, and that was reflected in the markup today,” said Emmanual Guillory, ACE’s senior director of government relations, in Inside Higher Ed. “In this political environment, flat funding is a win. It’s not ideal, but it is us being mindful of the current realities that we’re in and the financial constraints that we’re in, especially with the upcoming rescissions package that’s supposed to include education.”
Democratic members of the committee sought to add provisions that would reinstate previously frozen or retracted college grants and impose oversight on the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, but those amendments were rejected.
House leaders have postponed marking up that body’s version of the Labor-HHS-Education spending bill until September, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) last month released proposed funding levels that include nearly a 6 percent cut to nondefense programs and a $1.3 billion reduction for Labor-HHS-Education.
Guillory noted that the House may yet wield significant influence over the final outcome, even before releasing its specific education and health proposals. “I could see the House having a bit more influence than in most years past, as they have had more influence so far this Congress,” he told Inside Higher Ed.