Congress on Tuesday approved a plan to extend ongoing federal budget negotiations and delay implementation of controversial grant rule changes from Oct. 1 until Dec. 11, after the midterm elections.
House lawmakers voted 370-48 on Sept. 1 in favor of a continuing resolution, already approved last month by the Senate, that carries over current fiscal 2026 federal funding levels into the first two months of fiscal 2027. The measure now awaits the signature of President Donald Trump, who already indicated his support earlier this month.
Education advocates will now have to wait until at least mid-December to find out what funding will look like for the 2027-28 school year. That’s nothing new, though—Congress in recent years hasn’t finalized its full-year budget until February or March, roughly halfway into the fiscal year.
The difference this year, though, is that lawmakers from both chambers and both parties reached an agreement to avert a shutdown more than four weeks before the deadline. The federal government shut down last Oct. 1 to Nov. 15, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security shut down again this past Feb. 14 to April 30, after Congress failed to reach short-term fiscal 2026 funding agreements in time. During last fall’s shutdown, more than 2,100 U.S. Department of Education employees were furloughed, the department paused competitive grantmaking, and federal payments to school districts with non-taxable federal land were halted.
House Republicans earlier this summer advanced a budget bill that included billions of dollars in cuts to education programs. But Senate appropriators haven’t even begun their own process of negotiating spending levels, let alone reconciling their priorities with the House version.
A continuing resolution “sets a precedent of level funding that is logistically and politically hard to overturn once we get to December,” said Julia Martin, director of policy and government affairs at the Bruman Group, an education law firm that represents states and school districts.
New law delays grant rule changes that have sparked controversy
Passage of the continuing resolution this week also puts the brakes—for now—on an in-progress effort by the White House Office of Management and Budget to reshape the rules and procedures that govern billions of dollars in grants across the federal government, including billions of dollars for competitive education grants.
The changes, which would give executive branch political appointees unprecedented power over awarding and canceling federal funds, have drawn fierce opposition from education advocates and elected Democrats, as well as some Republicans including Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate’s appropriations committee.
Nearly half a million public comments flooded in on OMB’s proposed regulation changes. The Trump administration is required by law and respond to all of them before the final rule takes effect. The continuing resolution bars OMB from finalizing the rule while the continuing resolution is in effect.
Meanwhile, the Education Department and other agencies have advanced their own proposals to reform grantmaking. The continuing resolution doesn’t disrupt the timeline for those changes.
