RISE Committee Achieves Consensus On Student Loan Revisions
Mandated Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Statute
As Congress Continues To Try And Reach A Compromise
To Reopen the Federal Government

Overview
We waited as long as we could to provide you with the most timely information heading into the weekend. Here is the latest on both the successful completion of the RISE Committee’s Federal Negotiated Rulemaking by consensus and the prospect of an end to the current government shutdown based upon a new proposed compromise.

RISE Committee Negotiated Rulemaking
For only the second time in over a decade, a federal negotiated rulemaking committee was able to achieve consensus on a package of regulatory revisions. Congratulations go out to both the Department of Education and the Non-Federal negotiators for working together to come to agreement on a package of sixteen different regulatory requirements developed to implement the student loan portions of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OB3) statute.

CSPEN is in the process of developing a summary of the details of each individual issue, but this may take some time as the final agreed upon regulatory drafts are not publicly available and differ even from the last drafts that the negotiators has themselves. Nevertheless, we can share with you that significant favorable revisions were made to key areas of earlier concern/opposition on most, but not all topics. Most notably favorable resolutions were reached on the transition of the existing student loan system and multitude of loan repayment programs to the new duel repayment process over time, incorporation of the new loan program eligibility eliminations; annual, aggregate and lifetime loan limits were adopted; loan proration for less than full-time was successfully arbitrated; and the committee was able to come to a workable solution on the definition and eligibility of professional students.

One area where CSPEN hoped the Department would accept a proposal offered by the student loan servicers and supported by several Non-Federal negotiators related to enabling students seeking to rehabilitate their loans to be able to take advantage of the new statute if they began their consecutive on-time repayment prior to the trigger date and ended afterwards. Unfortunately, the Department rejected this proposal that would have benefited student borrowers and helped with the determination of institutional repayment/default rates.

Overall, the outcome was a very big success and the proposals do align – with some flexing – with the statutory directives of OB3.

Government Shutdown Day 38
As we noted yesterday, a Democratic Caucus lunch was looming large in the potential for a compromise that would enable Congress to pass a revised Continuing Resolution (CR) with agreements from the Republican leadership in both the Senate and House to also move forward to immediately pass a “minibus” of three bipartisan appropriations bills, and provide a Senate vote on the Affordable Health Act was on the table and supported by eight Democrats.

We noted that there was Democratic opposition to such a proposal by progressives within the Democratic Party who didn’t feel that the CR proposal went far enough, as it did not extend the benefits of the AHA.

Fast forward to today and this late afternoon email. As it stands now, the Democratic Party and Minority Leader Schumer have countered with an agreement to end the shutdown IF the CR includes a one-year extension of the AHA. They state that a vote on the law would be perfunctory given the current Republican majority and want something more concrete. Republican leadership is currently weighing the proposal, and have not either accepted or rejected it.

What’s Next
With the RISE Committee negotiations now complete, we have a month to go before the planned beginning of the Accountability in Higher Education and Access through Demand-driven Workforce Pell (AHEAD) Committee negotiations. As with the RISE Committee, the AHEAD Committee is also tasked with developing new and modifying existing regulations implementing the new Workforce Pell Grant statutory directive and institutional and programmatic accountability and eligibility – including development of the Low Earnings Outcome regime.

With respect to Congress and the shutdown, we will continue to monitor the situation, which is likely to go into the weekend and potentially next week. If a resolution is reached, we will share the details with you immediately.

Have a great weekend everyone!