Congress has approved, and President Obama has signed, the sixth short-term Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the federal government running. This latest CR is set to expire Friday, April 8. It contains an additional $6 billion in spending cuts, mainly from funding rescissions, reductions and program terminations. No accounts impacting higher education were cut in this CR....

Congress continues to struggle with the Fiscal Year 2011 budget. Last week, the Senate defeated both H.R. 1, the Continuing Resolution passed by the House of Representatives that would cut spending by $61 billion, and the Senate Democratic counter-proposal that would cut federal spending by about $6.5 billion. With the defeat of both bills and...

Congress returned from its recess last week. The top agenda item remained the FY 2011 budget. To avert a government shutdown when the current Continuing Resolution (CR) expired Friday, March 4, both the House and Senate agreed to a two-week extension of the CR until Friday, March 18. Included in this CR was $4 billion in cuts;...

Both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives are in recess this week. In the wee hours of the morning of Saturday, Feb. 19, the House of Representatives passed House Resolution 1 (H.R. 1), with amendments, largely along party lines, by a vote of 235-189. H.R. 1 is a Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the...

There has been a lot of activity in Washington, D.C., over the past week, primarily related to the federal FY2011 budget. Unfortunately, there is no good news for higher education or NIU. We want to provide you with the best information that we have been able to compile, recognizing that this information may change as...

The House of Representatives was on recess last week. The Senate was in session, and one of the main issues senators dealt with was a proposal by the Republicans to repeal the federal health insurance law, commonly referred to as “Obamacare.” This proposal was defeated in the Democrat-controlled Senate, although the Senate did agree to...

The shakeup in the U.S. Congress during the mid-term elections in November 2010 caused the departure of both freshmen and long-tenured members of Congress, resulting in new Congressional leadership, new composition of House and Senate committees, and correspondingly new legislative priorities. For NIU, we saw the departure of Bill Foster and the installation of Randy...

by Lori Clark, director, NIU Federal Relations The United States Congress has been discussing the Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act since it was first introduced in 2001. Even with bipartisan support, it has never managed to pass out of both chambers of Congress, despite changes to the bill designed to address various...