Tag: Senate

  • Montana President Eyes Senate Run

    Montana President Eyes Senate Run

    Bodnar has led the University of Montana since 2018.

    Don and Melinda Crawford/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    While the politician–to–college president pipeline is thriving in red states like Florida and Texas, University of Montana president Seth Bodnar aims to go the other direction with a Senate run.

    Bodnar is expected to launch a bid for the U.S. Senate as an Independent and will resign from his role as president, a job he has held since 2018, to do so, The Montana Free Press reported. 

    A Bodnar spokesperson confirmed the run and the resignation plans to the news outlet but said he would wait until after a formal announcement to provide more details. The move is reportedly part of a plan backed by Jon Tester, a Democrat who served in the Senate from 2007 to 2024. Tester was unseated by Republican Tim Sheehy in 2024.

    Bodnar

    The University of Montana

    Tester has reportedly expressed skepticism about chances for a Democratic victory but signaled support for Bodnar in a text message, viewed by local media, in which he pointed to the UM president’s background in private business, military service and Rhodes Scholar status.

    Bodnar holds degrees from the United States Military Academy and the University of Oxford. He served in Iraq as a member of the 101st Airborne Division, was a Green Beret in the U.S. Army’s First Special Forces Group, and later a lieutenant colonel in the Montana National Guard.

    Bodnar taught at West Point from 2009 to 2011 before joining General Electric, where he served in a variety of corporate leadership roles before he was recruited to take the UM presidency.

    A university spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed asking when a formal campaign announcement will be made or when Bodnar may step down.

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  • Texas just made it easier for students to report DEI, faculty senate violations

    Texas just made it easier for students to report DEI, faculty senate violations

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    Dive Brief:

    • Texas officials are encouraging college students, employees and the public to report violations of the state’s ban on faculty senates and diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
    • The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s newly created Office of the Ombudsman launched the Students First portal — separate from its existing student complaint portal — to give “the public easy access to file complaints and provide feedback” over colleges’ alleged legal violations.
    • Through Students First, college students and employees can submit formal complaints and are not required to have previously filed a complaint with the college. Members of the public can submit informal feedback.

    Dive Insight:

    The Students First portal focuses on violations of two significant Texas laws — 2023’s SB 17 and 2025′ SB 37.

    SB 17 prohibited colleges from having diversity offices or hiring employees to do DEI-focused work. It also banned mandatory DEI training for employees and students.

    While SB 17 functionally outlawed DEI at public colleges — making Texas one of the first to enact legislation growing increasingly popular in conservative states — SB 37 focused primarily on academic governance.

    The law stripped faculty senates of much of their authority and autonomy and shifted that power to political appointees. SB 37 also established the THECB’s ombudsman office. Earlier this month, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Brandon Simmons, the chair of the Texas Southern University Board of Regents, to lead the office.

    Republican state Sen. Brandon Creighton, author of SB 37, said in April that the bill is meant to affirm authority over public colleges lies with regents, not faculty. In Texas, regents are appointed by the governor.

    Prior to its passage, higher education advocates and faculty groups — including the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors and the Texas American Federation of Teachers — strongly opposed SB 37 and raised concerns over the erosion of academic freedom and increased political influence on college campuses.

    Creighton, who also wrote SB 17, resigned from the Legislature in October after being named the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System.

    In September, Abbott said Texas is “targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation.” The following month, Texas policymakers launched new select committees in the state House and Senate and tasked them with reporting on “bias, discourse, and freedom of speech” on college campuses.

    If the ombudsman office decides to investigate a formal complaint, the affected college will be notified within five days. From there, the college has 175 days to respond to the complaint — barring an office-granted extension — and 30 days to respond to any written requests for additional information.

    If the college is found to be out of compliance, it has 180 days to resolve the issues to the ombudsman office’s satisfaction.

    The ombudsman office will “submit to the Ombudsman and State Auditor a report on the noncompliance that includes the recommendations” if it determines the college “has not resolved issues and recommendations identified in the report,” according to the Students First portal.

    Simmons said Friday that he aims to foster a “collaborative, productive partnership with our institutional leaders and students” through the new “user-friendly website and engagement on campuses across Texas.”

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  • Senate advances bills rejecting Trump’s efforts to slash research funding

    Senate advances bills rejecting Trump’s efforts to slash research funding

    Dive Brief:

    • Senate lawmakers have engineered bipartisan fiscal 2026 spending proposals that would largely maintain scientific funding, defying the Trump administration’s calls for massive cuts to research. 
    • Budget bills released by Senate committees in recent days would provide $188.3 billion in total scientific research funding — 21.3% more than requested by the White House, according to an analysis published last week by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
    • However, legislators’ proposed research funding levels would still fall 3.6% below fiscal 2025 spending. The full Senate voted on Monday to advance the bills, teeing up a final vote. Congress needs to pass a budget by Jan. 30 to avoid another shutdown.

    Dive Insight:

    Since retaking office last year, President Donald Trump and his administration have pushed to downsize and disrupt the country’s longstanding system of scientific research, which for decades has relied on a financial partnership between the federal government and scientists, many of them attached to universities. 

    Headed into 2026, the Trump administration proposed broad-based cuts to the research. In all, it asked for $155.2 billion for scientific research — a 21% drop from fiscal 2025 levels — according to AAAS. 

    That figure obscures the depth of some agencies’ requested cuts. For example, the National Science Foundation under Trump asked Congress for a $3.9 billion budget — well under half its 2025 funding levels. Instead, the Senate’s appropriations committee on Thursday released an $8.8 billion budget for the NSF to “sustain U.S. leadership in scientific discovery.” 

    The Senate’s NSF proposal included investments in quantum information, artificial intelligence, regional innovation, and “critical” research facilities. 

    The Trump-appointed head of the National Institutes of Health requested $27.9 billion, a nearly 40% decrease from 2025’s $46 billion. The agency said the shrunken budget aimed to “maximize the impact of NIH research by streamlining processes and more efficiently providing funding.” 

    The Senate Appropriations committee rejected the administration’s proposal, instead advancing a $48.7 billion budget for NIH, according to Sen. Patty Murray’s office. Murray is the top-ranking Democrat on the committee.

    “The bill rejects the Trump administration’s harmful efforts to defund and dismantle critical work that HHS oversees — maintaining important funding for programs across HHS that touch the lives of nearly every American, while providing targeted increases to important bipartisan priorities,” Murray’s office said in a bill summary.

    While overall, Senate plans fall short of fiscal 2025 scientific research spending, its proposed $44.9 billion budget for basic research — which explores fundamental principles of nature and science — would tick up by 2.4% compared to last year, according to AAAS. 

    The provisional budget bill set to expire at the end of this month was a stopgap that ended the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history.

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  • Senate Democrats hold a press conference on Trump admin’s funding of SNAP benefits

    Senate Democrats hold a press conference on Trump admin’s funding of SNAP benefits

    Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) will hold a press conference to “discuss the Trump administration’s refusal to use a $5 billion emergency Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fund.”

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  • What I told the Senate Commerce Committee about ‘jawboning’

    What I told the Senate Commerce Committee about ‘jawboning’

    This prepared statement was delivered before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on Oct. 29, 2025.

    Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, and honorable members of the Committee,

    Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Will Creeley, and I am the legal director of FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to defending the rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought, the essential qualities of liberty.

    I’ve spent nearly 20 years defending the First Amendment rights of speakers from every point on the ideological spectrum. At FIRE, we have one rule: If speech is protected, we’ll defend it.

    Typically, the censorship we fight is straightforward: The government punishes a speaker for saying things the government doesn’t like. That’s a classic First Amendment violation, a fastball down the middle. Unfortunately, that kind of textbook censorship isn’t the only way government actors silence disfavored or dissenting speech.

    Far too often, government officials from both sides of the partisan divide engage in “jawboning” — that is, they abuse the actual or perceived power of their office to threaten, bully, or coerce others into censoring speech. This indirect censorship violates the First Amendment just as surely as direct suppression.

    What is jawboning? And does it violate the First Amendment?

    Indirect government censorship is still government censorship — and it must be stopped.


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    This isn’t new law. The First Amendment’s prohibition against coerced censorship dates back decades, to the Supreme Court’s 1963 ruling in Bantam Books v. Sullivan. In that case, the Court confronted a Rhode Island state commission that sent threatening letters, “phrased virtually as orders,” to booksellers distributing “objectionable” titles — with follow-up visits from police, to ensure the message had been received.

    The Court held the commission’s “operation was in fact a scheme of state censorship effectuated by extra-legal sanctions; they acted as an agency not to advise but to suppress.” And in the decades since, courts have consistently heeded Bantam Books’ call to “look through forms to the substance” of censorship, and to remain vigilant against both formal and informal schemes to silence speech.

    But government officials regularly abuse their power to silence others, so the lesson of Bantam Books bears repeating. And in deciding National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo last year, the Supreme Court unanimously and emphatically reaffirmed it.

    In Vullo, New York State officials punished the NRA for its views on gun rights by threatening regulatory enforcement against insurance companies that did business with the group and offering leniency to those who stopped. New York’s backdoor censorship was successful — and unlawful.

    This regulatory carrot-and-stick approach was designed to chill speech, and the Court reiterated that “a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly: A government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf.”

    A government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.

    To be sure, the government may speak for itself, and the public has an interest in hearing from it. But it may not wield that power to censor. As Judge Richard Posner put it: The government is “entitled to what it wants to say — but only within limits.” Under no circumstances may our public servants “employ threats to squelch the free speech of private citizens.”

    So the law is clear: Government actors cannot silence a speaker by threatening “we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,” as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission did last month. Nevertheless, recent examples of jawboning abound: against private broadcasters, private universities, private social media platforms, and more. The First Amendment does not abide mob tactics.

    Despite the clarity of the law, fighting back against jawboning is difficult. Targeted speakers can’t sue federal officials for monetary damages for First Amendment violations, removing a powerful deterrent. And as a practical matter, informal censorship is often invisible to those silenced.

    That’s particularly true in the context of social media platforms, as demonstrated by another recent Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri.

    Jawboning betrays our national commitment to freedom of expression.

    Murthy involved coercive demands by Biden administration officials to social media platforms about posts related to Covid-19, vaccines, elections, and other subjects, resulting in the suppression of speech the administration opposed. But the Court held the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, because the causal link between their deleted posts and the administration’s pressure wasn’t sufficiently clear.

    Murthy illustrates a severe information disparity: Users whose speech is suppressed have no way to know if government actors put their thumb on the scale. Only the government and the platforms have that knowledge, and usually neither want to share it. 

    That’s why FIRE authored model legislation that would require the government to disclose communications between federal agencies and social media companies regarding content published on its platform, with limited exceptions. But transparency is not enough. Federal officials must be meaningfully deterred from jawboning, and held accountable when they do.

    Jawboning betrays our national commitment to freedom of expression. Congress should take action to stop it.

    Thank you for your time. I welcome your questions.

    View FIRE’s full testimony with briefs for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on October 29, 2025

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  • Senate OKs Richey to Lead ED Civil Rights Office

    Senate OKs Richey to Lead ED Civil Rights Office

    Kim Richey recently served as a senior chancellor in the Florida Department of Education.

    Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee

    The Senate voted this week to confirm Kimberly Richey as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights—returning her to a role she held in an acting capacity from August 2020 until November 2021, spanning the end of President Trump’s first term and the start of President Biden’s. Richey also worked in the department during the George W. Bush administration.

    The vote was 51 to 47 along party lines, with Democrats and Independents all voting nay.

    Over the past few years, Richey worked in state positions as a senior chancellor in the Florida Department of Education and a deputy superintendent in the Virginia Department of Education. She now returns to the federal government to lead a greatly diminished Office for Civil Rights—the Trump administration laid off nearly half the OCR staff in March—with a significant case backlog.

    The administration is using what’s left of the office as an arm of its campaign against transgender rights, programs aimed at helping minorities and allegations of antisemitism. The OCR has been investigating both K–12 school districts and universities over these issues. Richey told senators during her June confirmation hearing that she’s committed to pursuing cases related to antisemitism and trans women playing on women’s sports teams.

    According to a résumé published by government watchdog American Oversight, Richey has also worked with conservative organizations to draft education legislation and policies. Those policy proposals mostly centered on K–12 and included promoting school choice and banning critical race theory (although the topic is not taught in K–12 schools). A 2022 receipt American Oversight uncovered indicated that Richey’s consultancy, RealignEd LLC, was paid $10,000 to “provide subject matter expertise, review and evaluation, and policy advice related to inherently divisive topics and other provisions” shortly after Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order prohibiting “the use of inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory,” in schools.

    Craig Trainor, the principal deputy assistant secretary for civil rights, has led the office as acting secretary since Trump took office earlier this year. In that post, he sent out controversial guidance banning race-based programming and activities, which was later blocked by the courts. He’s now moving to Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he’ll be the assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity.

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  • Senate Appropriators Reject Trump’s Education Dept. Cuts

    Senate Appropriators Reject Trump’s Education Dept. Cuts

    Senate Republicans are planning to protect the Pell Grant program, keeping the maximum grant award at $7,395 for the coming academic year, despite the Trump administration’s proposal to lower it to $5,710.

    The rejection of Pell Grant cuts at a key committee markup Thursday is just the latest rebuke from congressional appropriators as lawmakers in both chambers have appeared wary of President Trump’s plans to shutter offices, gut programs and generally reshape the federal government.

    In addition to protecting $22.5 billion for Pell, the GOP also spared TRIO, campus childcare subsidies and numerous other programs that Trump had proposed zeroing out. It also set new staffing standards for the recently gutted Department of Education, increased funding for medical research by $400 million and rejected the National Institutes of Health’s attempt to cap indirect research cost reimbursements at 15 percent. The legislation also restricts other efforts at NIH to change how grants are awarded, though Democrats say “more needs to be done to protect NIH research programs.”

    Over all, the Department of Education is going to receive $79 billion and the NIH will get $48.7 billion. In comparison, Trump had requested $66.7 billion for ED and $27.5 billion for NIH.

    Committee chair Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said she was proud of the legislation that advanced Thursday, calling it a bipartisan effort to fund the health and education of American families. She noted that “the appropriations process is the key way that Congress carries out its constitutional responsibility for the power of the purse.”

    But Democrats, while overall supportive, noted that they’ve had to make a number of compromises already and warned that Trump could still attempt to make unilateral changes moving forward.

    “These are not the bills I would have written on my own, but nonetheless they represent serious bipartisan work to make some truly critical investments in our country and families’ future,” said Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat and ranking member of the committee. Still, she added, this is only half the battle. “The fact of the matter is we have an administration right now that is intent on ignoring Congress, breaking the law and doing everything it can without transparency to dismantle programs and agencies.”

    The Trump administration has repeatedly frozen or cut grant funding, largely declining to spend money that Congress appropriated—moves that Murray and others have decried as illegal. More recently, the administration waited weeks before sending critical funding to states that supports after-school programs, migrant education and adult education. About $7 billion was affected, and colleges had to scramble to find a way to fill the funding gaps before Trump’s Office of Management and Budget finally released the money last week. Meanwhile, colleges are still waiting for the Education Department to open up grant applications for millions in funds.

    At NIH, grant cancellations and other changes have slowed the flow of research funding to colleges. Earlier this week the administration briefly paused all new grant awards, infuriating congressional Democrats. Over all, since Trump took office, the biomedical research agency has cut more than 4,000 grants at 600 institutions totaling somewhere between $6.9 billion and $8.2 billion.

    Beyond the grant cuts, the Trump administration recently clawed back money that had been allocated to public broadcasting, using a legislative process called rescission. The president is expected to propose a second rescission package in the months to come, this time targeting education dollars. Democrats have warned that using rescissions to change the budget could endanger talks on fiscal year 2026 spending.

    So while higher ed lobbyists typically look to the Senate’s spending plan as the framework for what to expect in the final bill, Trump’s willingness to test the limits of executive power complicates the picture.

    Still, the Senate’s proposals for the NIH as well as the Education Department, which funds a number of programs at the previous year’s level, is a victory for advocates who spent months warning that Trump’s budget cuts would be devastating for students and research.

    “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, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education. “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.”

    That said, Guillory noted that he’s bracing for deeper cuts from the House, which has yet to release its education and health spending proposals.

    “I could see the House having a bit more influence [than most years past], as they have had more influence so far this Congress,” he said.

    Seeking Guardrails

    Democrats did try to amend the bill in order to establish guardrails that would retroactively address Trump’s funding cuts and protect the fiscal year 2026 appropriations from a similar ambush.

    Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, proposed reinstating all college grants frozen or retracted since Jan. 28, with the exception of those pulled due to financial malfeasance. He highlighted how, in Chicago, the cuts have halted infant heart defect research and then ran through a lengthy list of other medical projects affected in other senators’ districts.

    “This could happen to any of your states’ research centers. It could hurt any of your families,” he argued.

    Later, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the few Democrats who did not support the bill, sought an inspector general report into whether the Department of Education’s civil rights office is properly following statutes when investigating discrimination complaints and issuing discipline.

    The Department of Education’s OCR, along with other agencies, has launched dozens of investigations into alleged civil rights violations at colleges and universities. Those inquiries haven’t followed the required statutory procedures, but colleges have lost funding and faced other consequences.

    Murphy proposed withholding OCR funding until the appropriations committee received the IG’s report.

    “My worry is simply that the president is going to ignore the will of Congress that is present in this legislation,” he said. “If this does become normalized—if the president of the United States gets to deny funds to universities because they don’t like political viewpoints of the student body or of the faculty—that is a Pandora’s box that is hard to ever again close.”

    Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the West Virginia Republican who leads the education and health subcommittee, shot down both proposals, calling Murphy’s amendment “contrary to the point of the [OCR] office” and Durbin’s “too broad.”

    “I think every administration has the prerogative to implement new goals and priorities,” she said.

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  • Senate committee rejects K-12 grant consolidations in FY 26 bill

    Senate committee rejects K-12 grant consolidations in FY 26 bill

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    The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday approved a bipartisan fiscal year 2026 K-12 education bill that would prevent the executive branch from removing Title I and special education programs to agencies outside the U.S. Department of Education. The legislation also rejects several other funding reforms proposed by the Trump administration.

    The bill would require timely awarding of formula grants by the Education Department to states and districts. For several weeks in July, the Education Department and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget withheld $6.2 billion in grant funding that states and districts expected access to starting July 1.

    That funding at pre-approved FY 2025 spending levels was released after the Trump administration conducted a “programmatic review” and added “guardrails” to ensure the funds would not violate executive orders or administration policy, a senior administration official at OMB told K-12 Dive in an email July 25.

    Educators, parents, education organizations, and Republican and Democratic lawmakers had pressured the administration to make the funds available, citing that the disruption in funds was causing school program cuts, canceled contracts and staff layoffs. 

    In total, the Senate Appropriations Committee recommends funding the Education Department in FY 26 at $79 billion, according to the bill text. That’s $12.3 billion more than President Donald Trump’s proposal of $66.7 billion. In the current fiscal year, the Education Department is funded at $78.7 billion. 

    “The bill also supports families by investing in education and affordable child care, which promotes financial stability for working parents and benefits our economy,” said Appropriations Committee Chair Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

    The proposed education budget — which was included in funding legislation for the U.S. Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and related agencies — passed the committee in a 26-3 vote. 

    “Our bills reject devastating cuts — and reject many of this administration’s absurd proposals — like dismantling the Department of Education,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, in her opening remarks. 

    “We all know President Trump cannot dismantle the Department of Education or ship education programs to other agencies. Authorizing laws prevent that. Appropriations laws prevent that,” Murray said. 

    Trump has said he wants to reduce the size and scope of the federal government and give states and localities more fiscal decision-making authority while reducing bureaucracy. 

    In March, Trump signed an executive order to shutter the Education Department to the “maximum extent appropriate.” Congress, however, would need to approve the closing of the agency.

    Maintaining separate formula grants

    The Trump administration’s budget proposed a new K-12 Simplified Funding Program that would merge 18 current competitive formula funding grant programs into one $2 billion formula grant program. The administration said the SFP would spur innovation and give states more spending flexibility and decision-making power.

    The Senate Appropriation Committee instead rejected that plan by keeping the formula grants separate. The Senate plan would provide a $50 million increase over FY 2025 spending for both Title I-A funding for low-income schools and districts, and for special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

    The bill would maintain current spending levels, except for a few reductions, across other K-12 formula and competitive grant programs targeting improvements in teaching and learning, according to a bill summary from Murray’s office. 

    Other notable spending proposals from the Senate Appropriations Committee FY 26 bill include:

    • The Office for Civil Rights would maintain level spending at $140 million.
    • The Institute of Education Sciences would be funded at $793 million, level with the FY 25 budget. 
    • Title I and IDEA would be funded at $18.5 billion and $15.2 billion, respectively. The two grant programs make up the largest share of funding for K-12 at the Education Department.
    • Under the HHS portion of the legislation, the committee recommends increasing funding for the early childhood learning programs Head Start and the Child Care and Community Block grant by $85 million each to $12.4 billion and $8.8 billion, respectively. 

    The Senate Appropriations bill will now be considered by the House and full Senate. FY 26 starts Oct. 1.

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  • DOJ Investigating George Mason Faculty Senate

    DOJ Investigating George Mason Faculty Senate

    Gregory Washington became George Mason University’s eighth president in 2020.

    Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    The Justice Department is now investigating the Faculty Senate at George Mason University after the panel backed the university president and affirmed that “diversity is our strength,” The New York Times reported.

    DOJ officials requested drafts of a faculty resolution passed in support of the president, Gregory Washington, who is facing multiple investigations from various federal agencies related to the diversity, equity and inclusion practices at the university. The DOJ also wants communications among Faculty Senate members who drafted the document as well as communications among those faculty and the president’s office. 

    The George Mason board is set to review the president’s performance at a meeting Friday, and faculty are worried Washington could be pushed out. 

    Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the civil rights division at DOJ, wrote in a letter to GMU that the Senate’s resolution was concerning in that it praised Washington’s efforts to diversify faculty and staff to reflect the student population

    Dhillon wrote, according to the Times, that “it indicates the GMU Faculty Senate is praising President Washington for engaging in race- or sex-motivated hiring decisions to achieve specific demographic outcomes among faculty and staff.”

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  • Senate Rejects Trump’s Cuts to NSF, Other Science Agencies

    Senate Rejects Trump’s Cuts to NSF, Other Science Agencies

    Sen. Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, proposed sending $9 billion to the National Science Foundation.

    Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    Signs that Congress intends to push back on the Trump administration’s wholesale slashing of federal budgets emerged during a Senate meeting Thursday that kicked off the annual appropriations process.

    Since January, the Trump administration has sought to significantly downsize the federal government via mass layoffs and spending cuts. Additionally, the administration has canceled grants and withheld funding despite laws that require agencies to spend money as directed by Congress.

    However, on Thursday a subcommittee that oversees the budgets for the Justice and Commerce Departments as well as related science agencies proposed only a small cut to the National Science Foundation budget next fiscal year—a far cry from the $5 billion reduction that President Donald Trump wants to see.

    Instead, NSF will get just over $9 billion, a $16 million cut, said Sen. Jerry Moran, the Kansas Republican who chairs the subcommittee. The bill also sends about $10 million more to the National Weather Service and boosts funding for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

    Although the science funding received bipartisan support, a fight over funding for the new Federal Bureau of Investigations headquarters could tank the legislation. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and vice chair of the subcommittee, objected to the Trump administration’s decision to move the headquarters to another building in Washington, D.C., rather than moving forward with a plan approved during the Biden administration to build a facility in Maryland. (Congress previously appropriated money for a new headquarters and set the criteria for the site selection.)

    After the Senate appropriations committee approved an amendment on Thursday from Van Hollen related to the headquarters, some Republicans on the committee changed their vote on the legislation and the panel recessed instead of making a final decision on whether to advance it.

    “I think it’s sad that one issue is sinking a bill that was bipartisan,” said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican and chair of the full appropriations committee.

    Still, Van Hollen said earlier in the meeting that there was “a lot of good news” in the legislation.

    “We were able to make smart and targeted investments to help keep our community safe, keep our country safe, to advance U.S. leadership in science and innovation and to support growth and prosperity of the American economy. We were able to protect agencies and programs like NASA science and STEM, [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and] NSF.”

    Higher education groups and research advocacy organizations had warned that slashing NSF’s budget by more than half would be catastrophic and set U.S. research back by decades. The Trump administration sought to end funding for STEM training and NSF’s education programs and significantly reduce the money available for scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships.

    The committee didn’t release any other information about the budget bill such as the text or a summary, so it’s not clear what the line-item budget for NSF looks like. The available details come from what lawmakers said at Thursday’s meeting.

    Van Hollen and Moran said that NASA would get about $24.5 billion to boost space exploration, whereas the administration has requested $18.8 billion.

    The additional $10 million for the National Weather Service would go toward restaffing an agency that’s lost about 17 percent of its head count—or 600 employees—due to buyouts and layoffs. NWS’s parent agency, NOAA, lost about 11 percent of its staff. The Trump administration requested about $91 million more for NWS and to cut NOAA’s budget by about $1.8 billion.

    After the government imposed significant reductions in force across federal agencies, lawmakers wrangled over details in the proposal that ensure NWS has enough personnel to continue functioning. The bill requires the agency to be fully staffed, but it doesn’t specify what that means aside from requiring the agency have enough employees to fulfill its statutorily required mission. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, didn’t think that language was strong enough to protect NWS and wanted to set the minimum staffing levels at the number of employees as of Sept. 30, 2024.

    “My judgment and the judgment of a lot of people who work at the National Weather Service is that ‘to fulfill the statutory mandate’ gives a fair amount of room to assert that the current staffing levels and the current layoff process fulfills the statutory mandate,” he said. “It’s clear to me that this administration has already made the judgment that the National Weather Service has too many human beings.”

    Moran said he and Schatz shared the “same desire,” but he didn’t want to specify a number. Other Republicans pointed out that NWS staff has fluctuated over the years. In fiscal year 2024, the agency had about 4,300 full-time employees, according to budget documents. Republicans voted down Schatz’s amendment.

    Moran noted earlier in the meeting that the language in the budget bill should protect NWS employees from furloughs or future reductions in force and end a hiring freeze.

    “This bill protects key science missions that are fundamental to furthering our understanding of the Earth and better stewards of our natural resources, and supports critical programs, not only to drive discovery, but to safeguard the Earth from natural disasters,” Moran said.

    Congress has until Sept. 30 to pass the 12 appropriations bills that make up the federal budget or else the government could shut down. Democrats and some Republicans also want to use this process to reassert Congress’s authority in spending decisions.

    “The challenges we face and the threats to this very process are greater than ever before with the president and administration intent on ignoring the laws that we write and seizing more power for themselves,” said Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington and vice chair of the appropriations committee.

    “But at the end of the day, I do believe these bills are all a good compromise starting point, delivering critical resources to continue key programs and make targeted new investments—rejecting some of the truly harmful proposed cuts by the president and steering clear of the extreme partisan policies he’s requested.”

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