“This $17 billion in dedicated mandatory funding for Pell Grants helps close the program’s funding gap, protecting Pell Grants from harmful cuts without impairing other critical discretionary programs,” said Pauline Abernathy, vice president of The Institute for College Access & Success, in a statement. “More than nine million students depend on Pell Grants to attend and complete college. Even with a Pell Grant, recipients are more than twice as likely as other students to have to take out student loans, and they graduate with significantly more debt than other students.”
She added: “A broad coalition of 62 education, student, civil rights, and public policy organizations urged the president to preserve the maximum Pell Grant award of $5,550 and protect the program from harmful cuts in the debt negotiations. Even after the recent increases in the maximum Pell Grant [amount], it will cover less than a third of the cost of attending a four-year public college next year—the smallest share in the history of the program. Full funding for Pell Grants is absolutely essential to fulfilling the president’s goal of the U.S. once again having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.”
The debt-ceiling measure would provide an immediate $400 billion increase in the $14.3 trillion U.S. borrowing cap, with $500 billion more assured this fall. That $900 billion increase would be matched by cuts to agency budgets over the next 10 years, including cuts to federal education funding.
What follows next is more complicated. The measure establishes a special 12-member bipartisan committee to draft legislation to find up to $1.5 trillion more in deficit reductions for a vote later this year. These additional cuts are likely to come from so-called mandatory programs such as federal retirement benefits, farm subsidies, Medicare, and Medicaid. The savings would be matched by a further increase in the borrowing cap.
There’s no guarantee the committee, to be evenly split between the warring parties, will agree on such legislation. But there are powerful incentives to do so, because more budget gridlock would trigger a crippling round of automatic cuts across much of the budget, including Pentagon coffers.
The details of the final bill were still sketchy as of press time. But a source on Capitol Hill said it was possible that, if the committee fails to reach agreement on the second wave of reductions and across-the-board cuts kick in, K-12 nondiscretionary education funding could be cut by as much as $3 billion each year from 2013 to 2021.
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