From an article in The Hill this past Wednesday:
Democrats have said Republicans for the last two years have failed to bring up any major jobs bills, which they generally define as bills that increase spending to fund construction projects.
In contrast, Republicans have said the House has passed dozens of jobs bills, which they generally define as bills that remove federal regulation to make it easier for companies to do business and expand. (my emphasis)
Last week, I mentioned the big gap between the House and Senate Labor-HHS appropriations bills—the congressional spending bills that include, among other things, funding for Title II of the Workforce Investment Act, the largest source of federal funding for adult literacy and adult and family education programs. As I noted in an update to that post, the House Labor, Health and Human Services Subcommittee postponed (perhaps forever) the markup of their bill last week, and so we never got a chance to see officially what kind of cuts they were proposing in order to stay under the budget cap they were assigned.
This week the news is all about another appropriations bill, the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) Appropriations bill, which did make it out of committee, but was pulled from floor consideration yesterday. Today, a Senate version of the bill failed to clear a filibuster.
For adult education advocates, the THUD bill is also worth paying attention to. As I often point out, there are several other important sources of federal funding for adult education besides WIA, and the THUD bill includes funding for one of them—the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program.
CDBG funds are essentially a form of federal aid to cities. It is consequently very popular among mayors and many members of Congress representing urban areas. Managed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), CDBG funding “provides communities with resources to address a wide range of unique community development needs”—and that can include education and training programs.
I learned when I was working at ProLiteracy that CDBG funds support quite a few urban community-based adult education programs (here’s one example), although it’s hard to figure out exactly how much CDBG money ultimately ends up in the hands of adult education programs because the funding is typically subgranted to programs via another local government entity, and I don’t know of a source that compiles all of the CBOs and other entities that receive subgrants that are funded via CDBG dollars.
But it’s a sure bet that some adult education programs have already taken a hit due to the cuts to CDBG funding that have already occurred due to sequestration (the program is now down to $3 billion). If the additional cuts proposed for FY 2014 in the House bill took effect, the hit on adult education programs that receive CDBG funds would likely be severe: according to Brad Plummer of the Washington Post, the House THUD bill was going to cut the program all the way down to $1.6 billion.
Interestingly, according to Plummer, “this was the cut that doomed the bill, repelling Democrats and some moderate Republicans.”
The THUD debacle thus serves as a reminder to adult education advocates that: (a) there is a very popular federal program outside of WIA that funds a substantial number of community-based adult education programs; and (b) the funding for that program has been cut substantially over the last several years (Plummer notes that states have lost $2.5 billion in CDBG funding since 2010), and remains in a volatile state.
(Updated Below)
Just a reminder that the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee will mark up legislation to reauthorize the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) today at 10:00am. The National Skills Coalition has published a nice summary that provides some good background on this bill.
The National Coalition for Literacy has sent the committee a letter of support for the bill.
There is still apparently some disagreement in the disability community about the title on vocational rehabilitation negotiated separately from the rest of the bill by HELP committee Chairman Harkin (D-IA) and Ranking Member Alexander (R-TN). Their plan establishes new requirements that must be met before individuals with disabilities could be allowed to work for less than the federal minimum wage, but some advocates are concerned it does not go far enough.
UPDATE 11:05 AM: Well, that was quick. The Committee passed the bill quickly and uneventfully about 20 minutes into the session, by a vote of 18-3. Voting no were Sens. Burr, Scott, and Roberts. Sen. Paul not voting.
UPDATE 2:30 PM: In a piece published in The Hill this morning, Dr. Fredric K. Schroeder, former commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration under President Clinton and a vice president at the National Federation of the Blind, explains his concerns about the vocational rehabilitation changes proposed by Sens. Harkin and Alexander:
Section 511 purports to permit placement in subminimum wage work only as part of training for later competitive employment, with a review of the worker’s status required every six months. But this approach would merely write subminimum wages into the Rehabilitation Act—where there has never before been any language authorizing subminimum wages. Sheltered workshops often claim that they are training their workers, but we know from sad experience and extensive study that 95 percent of the workers who enter sheltered workshops never leave them. Section 511 does nothing but require a rehabilitation counselor to certify that a worker is in “training” every six months. This proposal will simply make the rehabilitation system complicit in the exploitation of disabled workers from the time they are old enough to leave school—or possibly earlier—until they die.
The Senate Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) Committee has officially announced on its Web site that it will markup the Workforce Investment Act of 2013 on Wednesday, July 31, 2013. The bill was introduced earlier today by Sens. Murray, Isakson, Harkin and Alexander.
Literacy & Policy 