Weekly Federal Update 3/14/22

President Biden promptly signed a bill to fund the federal government through September 30 after Congress passed a $1.5 trillion omnibus government funding bill…

President and Administration

Executives from Samsung, Whirlpool, HP, Medtronic, Micron, and Cummins came to the White House Wednesday, 3/9, along with governors Eric Holcomb (R-IN) and Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), to address the semiconductor shortage…

The President’s Committee on People with Intellectual Disabilities serves as a federal advisor to the President and the Secretary of Health and Human Services on matters relating to persons with intellectual disabilities…

The 2020 Census missed counting Latinos, Blacks, and other minority groups and overcounted Whites and Asians, according to the bureau’s post-enumeration survey, a resurvey of randomly selected geographic areas the bureau conducts after each decennial census…

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Thursday, 3/10, ,that Americans will likely see another year of “very uncomfortably high” inflation as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine muddles her prior forecast that price acceleration would moderate in the months ahead…

The American Academy of Pediatrics and American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, in collaboration with experts from the National Institute of Mental Health, have created a comprehensive set of resources intended to support pediatric health clinicians in identifying strategies and partnerships to support children and teens at risk for suicide…

Senators are expected to confirm Shalanda D. Young to lead the Office of Management and Budget this week, installing a Senate-confirmed leader in the only Biden administration cabinet post to remain vacant since inauguration day…

The White House has released new fact sheets highlighting the one year anniversary of the American Rescue Plan…

Congress  

The Senate unanimously passed a bill last week that criminalizes lynching and make it punishable by up to 30 years in prison…

Education

The Biden administration dropped a new hint last week that it may further extend the freeze on federal student loan payments for tens of millions of borrowers as the White House weighs a final decision… 

The Education Department announced last week that it has identified 100,000 borrowers with approximately $6.2 billion in loans to be erased by the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program…

Northern Essex Community College, the first Hispanic-serving institution in Massachusetts, experienced an alarming 7.5 percent drop in Hispanic student enrollment at the height of the pandemic in fall 2020…

Weekly CA-COVID Update 3/8/22

Breaking Federal News

Government funding expires on Friday, 3/11, and we still haven’t seen the $1.5 trillion omnibus bill designed to keep federal agencies open through the end of the fiscal year…

President Biden announced this morning, 3/8, that the U.S. will ban imports of Russian oil and other energy products, but will not be joined in doing so by many European allies and partners… 

California

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “State of the State” is tonight at 5pm PT…

As California cities struggle to address a homelessness and mental health crisis, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration on Thursday, 3/3, unveiled a proposal to push more people with severe psychiatric disorders and addiction issues into court-ordered care that includes medication and housing… 

California lawmakers are trying again to get rid of the nation’s only law that lets voters veto public housing projects, a provision added to the state constitution in 1950 to keep Black families out of white neighborhoods…

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) endorsed Dr. Asif Mahmood, a Democrat, in his race to flip CA-40 and defeat Rep. Young Kim. Congresswoman Porter currently represents a large portion of the new CA-40…

Last week, CA Attorney General Bonta united with other state prosecutors to probe whether and how the video-sharing app could be undermining young peoples’ health…

The average price of a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline in California is now a whopping $5.28, compared with $3.73 at the same time a year ago, according to the latest data from the American Automobile Association…

Coronavirus

The White House unveiled a new pandemic road map on Wednesday, 3/2, and has formally requested $22.5 billion from Congress… 

President Biden’s surgeon general on Thursday, 3/3, formally requested that the major tech platforms submit information about the scale of COVID-19 misinformation on social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)…

More than a month after the COVID-19 Omicron surge peaked and began to decline, and as states are lifting COVID-related restrictions, the staffing crisis at many hospitals remains high…

Contradicting guidance from the CDC, Florida will soon recommend that healthy children not get vaccinated against COVID-19, the state’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, announced yesterday, 3/7...

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) is still experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, almost two years after his spring 2020 infection and he’s putting that experience, plus his perch on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, to advocate for research funding to learn more about long COVID-19…

A New York Times poll of 150,000 parents found that in January, more than half of American children missed at least three days of school…

New Institute of Education Sciences data found that the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a staffing shortage in the nation’s schools…

More than 140 million Americans have had COVID-19, according to estimates from blood tests that reveal antibodies from infection - about double the rate regularly cited by national case counts…

Weekly Federal Update 3/7/22

State of the Union

President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass the CHIPS Act, a law that would provide chipmakers with $52 billion in subsidies to advance semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, during his State of the Union speech…

President Biden proposed an additional $2,000 in assistance to low-income students by increasing the Pell Grant award…

Declaring that children’s “lives and education have been turned upside-down,” President Joe Biden highlighted the pandemic’s blow to student mental health and fixed some of the blame on social media… 

Last week, the White House announced plans to boost nursing home staffing and oversight, blaming some of the 200,000-plus COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents and staff during the pandemic on inadequate conditions…

President and Administration

A new report from SAMHSA on children’s mental health used data from different sources to describe mental health and mental disorders in children during 2013–2019… 

A new fact sheet from SAMHSA provides data about trending alcohol use among girls and young women… 

Last week, the Supreme Court appeared poised to narrow the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to reduce carbon pollution from power plants, a move that could further derail President Biden’s ambitious plans to fight climate change… 

Last week, a Texas judge partially blocked enforcement of Gov. Greg Abbott’s order to treat gender-affirming care as child abuse…

The U.S. Economic Development Administration received 509 applications for the Good Jobs Challenge…

Congress  

Government funding expires on Friday night, 3/11, and House and Senate appropriators were scrambling to finish the omnibus package over the weekend… 

The upcoming funding bill to keep the government open is unlikely to include tax provisions… 

Last week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said that he could support a smaller version of Build Back Better that splits revenue equally between new spending and deficit reduction…

The Job Protection Act, unveiled on Thursday, 3/3, by Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN), would extend existing protections under the Family and Medical Leave Act to part-time and gig workers, as well as employees of small businesses…

Last week, the House overwhelmingly approved legislation that would make lynching a federal hate crime…

Education

To assist educators and policymakers on how to support students with disabilities during COVID-19, the Department compiled relevant resources on a dedicated Disability Rights web page…

Black and Latino students are suspended at disproportionately high rates compared to their peers, a phenomenon that starts as early as preschool…

The Los Angeles Community College District will not appeal a lower court’s ruling on disability services to the Supreme Court… 

More than 60 percent of likely voters would support another extension of the Education Department’s freeze on federal student loan payments, according to a new tracking poll out last week from the progressive groups Data for Progress and the Student Borrower Protection Center… 

The White House has already begun meeting with outside groups to discuss the Education Department’s proposal - which is not yet public - to overhaul Title IX regulations governing sexual misconduct in schools and federal protections for LGBT students…

A new report identified five policy priorities based on the data and feedback from principals in the focus groups: (1) Improve principal pipelines and workforce incentives; (2) Rethink testing and accountability; (3) Consult administrators on principal and teacher preparation and professional development; (4) Honor, recognize and listen to principals; (5) Boost funding and resources…

In honor of Career and Technical Education (CTE) Month, the Department published multiple blogs: “CTE Pathways to Quality Jobs,” “Fast Forward to 2022: Showcasing our Scholars in CTE Alumni,” and “American Rescue Plan Reengaging Students through CTE”…

Weekly CA-COVID Update 3/1/22

California

Students will no longer need to wear masks in schools after next Friday, 3/11, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday, 2/28…

Decades of underinvestment in schools, culture battles over bilingual education, and dizzying levels of income inequality have made California the least literate state in the nation… 

San Francisco’s dedicated homelessness department, created in 2016, has an annual budget of $598 million - a sum that has more than tripled in its short existence… 

California's first-in-the nation reparations task force was poised to answer the question of who should be eligible for reparations last month, on 2/24, but instead delayed the historic vote until March… 

Sen. Dianne Feinstein‘s husband Richard Blum died on Sunday after a protracted fight with cancer, the California senator announced yesterday, 2/28…

The federal government announced initial 2022 water allocations last week for customers of the Central Valley Project, and the figures were dismal: Most irrigation districts in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys can expect to receive no deliveries from the project’s vast network of reservoirs and canals…

Coronavirus

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eased mask recommendations for the vast majority of the country Friday, 2/25, under a new framework to monitor COVID-19 that immediately affects about 70 percent of Americans - a process that state and local officials had already begun amid demands for a return to normalcy…

A National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (Australia) study of children infected by COVID-19 in New South Wales between 10/18 and 12/17 "produced ‘reassuring data’ that suggests the majority of cases in children were contracted at home”…

An analysis found that between the end of November and last week, the U.S. reported over 30 million new COVID-19 cases and over 154,000 new deaths, compared with 11 million cases and 132,000 deaths from 8/1 through 10/31…

A flurry of new studies finds that people who have received a booster shot of the COVID-19 vaccine may not need another for many months, and perhaps not for years…

A new study estimates that at least 5.2 million children around the world lost a parent or other caregiver to COVID-19 in the first 19 months of the pandemic…

Weekly Federal Update 2/28/22

President and Administration

President Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court on Friday, 2/25, setting in motion a historic confirmation process for the first Black woman to sit on the highest court in the nation…

The State of the Union (SOTU) is scheduled for tomorrow, 3/1, in the House chamber in the Capitol…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began late Wednesday evening, 2/23, kicking off the most significant military incursion in Europe since World War II… 

Congress  

A report from Moody’s Analytics defends the American Rescue Plan (ARP) saying that “the ARP has been criticized as being too large, overstimulating an already fast-improving economy and significantly contributing to the currently uncomfortably high inflation”…

On Friday, 2/25, the Department of Education released a new fact sheet highlighting ways states and school districts are using American Rescue Plan funds to reengage students and enhance academic learning by expanding career and technical education (CTE) opportunities…

Nearly 90 percent of the next House could be occupied by lawmakers who face almost no threat of losing a general election, a precipitous drop that dramatically changes the political incentives and pressures they confront… 

Education

Last week, the National Science Board published “Higher Education in Science and Engineering,” a new set of congressionally mandated STEM indicators… 

In some districts, proposals aimed at making schools more welcoming places for students from diverse backgrounds have been reversed as a result of a conservative takeover of school boards, while work elsewhere faces a chill from acrimonious debate around topics that have been mislabeled as critical race theory…

Puerto Rico and eight states are asking the Department of Education to waive a requirement that stipulates they must continue funding higher education at or above current levels in order to keep the federal dollars they received during the pandemic…

The latest Student Voice survey from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse found 1,550 of the 2,000 undergraduate student respondents will have student loan debt after graduation…

Enrollment and attendance in pre-K - especially among Black and Latino preschoolers - improves when programs operate for a full school day instead of a few hours in the morning or afternoon, a new study shows…

The Common Application has released its data (nationally, not for individual colleges) through 2/15 - and the numbers are very encouraging for colleges…