The Senate parliamentarian has determined that provisions in the Senate’s budget reconciliation bill that would establish workforce Pell grants do not comply with the rules governing the budget reconciliation process, according to material released by Senate Budget Committee Democrats on Wednesday evening.
While this is a major setback, it does not necessarily mean the end of the road for workforce Pell in the bill.
A budget reconciliation bill is not subject to a filibuster in the Senate and therefore only needs 51 votes to pass (as opposed to the typical 60 votes). To qualify for this privileged status, the bill must adhere to certain budgetary rules, among them the so-called “Byrd Rule,” named after former Sen. Robert Byrd. The Byrd rule seeks to keep “extraneous matter” that is not directly related to the budget out of a reconciliation bill. Accordingly, the rule prohibits provisions that have no impact on mandatory spending or revenues (except for provisions that set out the “terms and conditions” of provisions that do have a budgetary impact) or provisions for which the budgetary impact is “merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision.”
While the reasoning for the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling is not known at this time, it seems likely that she found the budgetary impacts of the workforce Pell provisions to be merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision. This may be, in part, because the Pell Grant program is predominantly funded through discretionary appropriations, which do not fall under the budget reconciliation process. So, the increase in mandatory spending that results from an expansion to the Pell program might be seen as “merely incidental” to the overall change in policy.
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Senate Republicans still have some options. First and foremost, they can try to modify the workforce Pell provisions so that they do not violate the Byrd rule. Failing that, they could keep the provision in the bill and force a vote on the Senate floor.
The parliamentarian’s determination at this stage is simply an indication of how she would rule if a senator raised a point of order on the floor saying that workforce Pell violated the Byrd rule. A point of order can be set aside by a vote of 60 or more senators.
However, such a vote is very unlikely to succeed, as all Democrats would likely vote to uphold the point of order, even if they support workforce Pell in general. For this reason, provisions found by the parliamentarian to violate the Byrd rule and that can’t be fixed are usually stripped from a reconciliation bill before it hits the floor.
The Senate parliamentarian also found other higher education provisions in the reconciliation bill to violate the Byrd rule. Most importantly, she found that changes to student loan repayment options could not be applied to current borrowers. This is likely to significantly reduce the budget savings achieved by those provisions. Provisions extending student aid eligibility to certain immigrants from Cuba and elsewhere and a tweak to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program were also deemed to be violations. Provisions that would repeal the Borrower Defense to Repayment rule and limit the education secretary’s authority to issue “economically significant” regulations are apparently still under review.
