Sponsors (24)
Introduced January 30, 2025 by Christopher Van Hollen · Last progress January 30, 2025
The bill locks in multi‑year, more predictable and larger federal funding for Title I and special education—helping low‑income students and students with disabilities and improving planning for schools—while doing so by creating large mandatory spending commitments and emergency budget treatment that reduce fiscal flexibility, transparency, and produce uneven state‑level effects.
Title I-eligible schools, low-income students, and students with disabilities get guaranteed baseline federal funding and more-stable special education funding across FY2026–FY2035, increasing resources and predictability for services.
State and local education agencies can plan multi-year programs, staffing, and budgets because funding floors and extended availability windows create greater budget predictability.
Tying grant amounts to a per-pupil multiplier (average per‑pupil expenditure) helps scale funding with student counts and national spending levels, better aligning funding to changes in enrollment and overall education spending.
All taxpayers face large, recurring mandatory spending commitments over the coming decade to support the guaranteed floors (including substantial increases for special education), which increases federal outlays and could crowd out other priorities.
Designating the funding as emergency and exempting it from PAYGO avoids normal offsets and budgetary scrutiny, increasing the risk of higher deficits and reducing transparency and congressional accountability over fiscal tradeoffs.
Fixed mandatory funding floors reduce Congress's flexibility to reallocate education funds or respond to future fiscal pressures and changing programmatic needs.
Based on analysis of 5 sections of legislative text.
Creates mandatory, multi-year federal funding floors and fixed availability dates for Title I Part A and IDEA Part B grants starting in FY2026 and designates the increases as emergency budget requirements.
Creates mandatory, multiyear federal funding floors for K–12 Title I Part A programs and for IDEA Part B (grants for children with disabilities), starting in fiscal year 2026 and running through the early-to-mid 2030s. The bill specifies year-by-year minimum dollar amounts or percentage-based guarantees (whichever is greater) and makes those amounts automatically available on set July 1 start dates, while also designating the added amounts as emergency requirements for budget scorekeeping.