Senate Continues Marathon Vote-a-Rama on Reconciliation – Day Two of Neg Reg Starts Critical Review of New Proposals

Senate Consideration of Motions to Commit Slow Reconciliation Deliberations To A Crawl As Regulatory Negotiations Begin to Pick Up Speed

Overview
CSPEN, like many others in Washington, have been attempting to be two places at the same time in order to monitor the ongoing Senate floor’s activities seeking to complete consideration of the Senate’s consideration of a revised Budget Reconciliation bill, while at the same time monitoring the first day of a three-day negotiated rulemaking meeting being hosted by the Department of Education seeking revisions to key Public Service Loan Program regulations. Below is an update on the status of both important deliberations and negotiations running concurrently here in Washington.

Senate Budget Reconciliation
As of this morning, the United States Senate continues to move ever so slowly towards the completion of the consideration of an unlimited number of proposed amendments to the Senate re—write of H.R. 1 – The One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Republican Party had hoped that they would have completed this phase of the process sometime yesterday, but the Democrats has other plans. From the beginning of debate yesterday morning, Democrats used procedural votes seeking the ability to return each title of the bill back to the respective committee to significantly slow the process to a crawl.

Following more than thirteen hours of this series of presentations and votes on various procedural motions, the chamber actually began to bring forward the amendments filed for consideration last night at around ten o’clock in the evening. That process has continued throughout the night and continues yet this morning. As we construct this update, the Senate continues to plod through amendments, including some proposals focusing on elementary and secondary and higher education proposals. Thus far, none of the amendments brought forward, including some by Republicans, have been adopted to our knowledge (admittedly we were not awake all night).

CSPEN will continue to monitor the floor negotiations and summarize key proposals on education policy in either an email late in the day today, or more realistically tomorrow morning’s update/ In that update we anticipate providing a summary of the conclusion of the Senate’s consideration of all the amendments, a vote on final passage, and the beginning of U.S. House of Representatives consideration of the legislation to follow.

2025 Federal Negotiated Rulemaking
Day one of a scheduled three-day negotiation was spent establishing the protocols and seeking non-federal negotiators’ views on a series of proposed revisions to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness portion of the federal regulations. Based upon the discussion of the day, new – updated regulatory language was constructed by the Department and shared with the negotiations at approximately 10 PM last night for review. The now, updated language, based upon the insights gained from day one, will now form the basis of today’s actual consideration of the proposed revisions and additions to the regulations.

Heading into today, the ability to obtain consensus does appear to be within reach, but there are some negotiators who are focused on the promotion of proposals that are outside the purview of both the authority of negotiations (requiring changes in statute) and or scope of the negotiations. Hopefully, throughout the course of today’s negotiations the entire committee, both the Department and all non-federal negotiations will be able to turn their focus to the proposals that are the subject of this upon narrow set of regulatory proposals being proposed.

What’s Next
CSPEN will continue to actively monitor both sets of deliberations and provide an update to the higher education community later today or first thing tomorrow. Once the Senate completes their bill, we will try to send out a quick announcement of the vote on final passage, and share with you a first look at the prognosis for House approval. With respect to the negotiated rulemaking, we will provide an update on the critically important negotiations to take place today in tomorrow morning’s email – providing an update on the status of the development of the key regulatory revisions and additions and forecast on the final day’s negotiations ahead.