WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans on Tuesday were waiting to hear back from Democrats after they sent them a new offer to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which has been shut down since mid-February. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the proposal would fund many of the agencies within DHS, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard, but wouldn’t provide new spending for some immigration enforcement and deportation activities. 

Those programs, mostly run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, received tens of billions of dollars in Republicans’ 2025 “big, beautiful” law, largely exempting those federal workers from the shutdowns.

Thune said the offer currently on the table would leave the door open to the House and Senate moving another budget reconciliation bill through that complicated process to provide additional funding for immigration and deportation programs.

The special legislative pathway would allow GOP leaders to move a bill through the Senate with a simple majority vote as long as they adhere to its rules. That would skirt the need for Democratic votes to get beyond the 60-vote legislative filibuster that applies to other bills. 

Pressure for a bipartisan deal to fund DHS mounted in recent days after security lines at airports throughout the country ballooned into multi-hour waits, leading passengers to miss their flights and face expensive rebooking fees. Union leaders on Tuesday demanded lawmakers reach a deal to fund the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of DHS.

SAVE Act as well

A possible reconciliation package, Thune said, could include elements of the SAVE America Act, an elections bill backed by President Donald Trump that remains stalled in the Senate amid Democratic opposition.

“This is a really good outcome, where we’ve moved the Democrats a long way in our direction,” Thune said. “And I think also an understanding that reconciliation could be a possibility in terms of additional funding and for perhaps addressing the SAVE America Act.”

Thune said the DHS spending bill wouldn’t include any of the overhauls to immigration enforcement that Democrats have advocated for since federal officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.  

“What was pretty clear is that they didn’t want funding,” he said. “So if you’re not going to have funding, I don’t know how all of a sudden now you can demand reforms, because I think for them, that was the issue.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said during an afternoon press conference Democrats would prepare a counteroffer that would include changes to how ICE functions. 

“This does not have any reforms in ICE. But negotiations are ongoing and they’ve sent us an offer and we’ll be sending them an offer back,” the New York Democrat said. “And I can assure you it will contain significant reform in it.”

Schumer outlined what he described as “common sense” changes to immigration enforcement activities in late January after two U.S. citizens were killed by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis.

Dems stick to immigration reforms

Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., said she will continue to press for “modest reforms” to immigration activities during negotiations over the DHS spending bill.  

“If we are talking about funding any part of ICE or CBP, we absolutely must take some key steps to rein them in. The current Republican offer in front of us does not do that,” she said. 

Murray later added that negotiators “have made some progress and the White House has already agreed to some steps” but that the entire point is that “reforms must make it into law.”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said the Trump administration has “created this problem in which it’s really hard to address an immigration enforcement operation that’s out of control because it is funded out of almost every part of the DHS budget.”

Murphy said his sense is that Democrats are “still firm on our insistence that we’re not going to fund an immigration enforcement operation without reform.”

Republicans argue for deal

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford said the latest DHS funding offer represents what Democrats have “asked for multiple times” and that Trump has signed off on it. 

Lankford said GOP senators “could” move additional spending on immigration enforcement through the reconciliation process, pointing to the funding they approved just last year in the “big, beautiful” law.

“We’ve had things like that, even in the last year, and then Democrats had things like that in the (Inflation Reduction Act) as well,” he said. 

North Dakota Republican Sen. John Hoeven said he believes Democrats “need to take” the deal on DHS funding. 

“They keep telling us they’ll go with us and now they need to do it,” he said. “They can’t keep trying to back up or change the deal. It’s time to get it done.”

Adding SAVE Act could be difficult

Republicans’ plan to use the complex budget reconciliation process to pass additional funding for immigration and deportation programs as well as elements of their voter identification bill, dubbed the SAVE America Act, could face headwinds. 

Any reconciliation bill would need the support of nearly every Republican in Congress, a complicated obstacle given the party’s especially narrow majority in both chambers. 

The reconciliation process is also arduous and filled with rules at nearly every turn, including that all of its elements must address federal revenue, spending, or debt. And those changes cannot be deemed “merely incidental” by the Senate parliamentarian. 

Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, cast some doubt on using the reconciliation process to move elements of the SAVE America Act, saying, “I don’t think that’s a good approach.”

West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said Republicans “are at the beginning” of figuring out what, if any, elements of the SAVE America Act can move through the reconciliation process. 

“It’s going to be difficult because it’s not a budgetary impact, it’s a policy impact. But that doesn’t mean some good things can’t move forward that would help with the integrity of the vote,” she said. “So we’ll just have to wait and see. I think reconciliation is probably something we’re going to be strongly considering when we get back.”

Citizenship proof

The legislation has several elements but generally would require Americans to prove their citizenship by showing a birth certificate or a passport when they register to vote. When voters try to cast a ballot they would need to show photo identification. And all states would be required to submit their voter rolls to a DHS database. 

The bill will not be able to make it through the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster given strong opposition from Democrats.

South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds said one option for moving “items” in the SAVE America Act through reconciliation would be to provide funding for states to implement some of its provisions. 

“I haven’t seen the specific language on it. I just know that in most cases, what you’re talking about is making money available,” he said. “The policy would not be included, but the resources would be made available because you can’t do policy in reconciliation, you do resources.”

Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno said GOP senators will “do whatever we can in reconciliation to get pieces and parts of” the SAVE America Act into law. 

And while he wasn’t entirely sure how Republicans would prove that those changes aren’t “merely incidental” to the multi-trillion-dollar federal budget, he said there is “a whole team of really, really smart people that will answer that question.”

Moreno said Republicans “don’t have to get every single thing in every single way” on the SAVE America Act. 

“You just keep the conversation going,” he said. “Eventually, the American public is going to punish Democrats who aren’t following up on 80-20 issues.”

WASHINGTON — Alan Armstrong, a Tulsa businessman, was sworn in Tuesday as Oklahoma’s newest U.S. senator.

Armstrong temporarily fills the seat of Markwayne Mullin, who was sworn in as U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary earlier Tuesday. 

The Senate on Monday confirmed Mullin’s nomination to lead the agency responsible for carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. 

Armstrong was sworn in at the U.S. Capitol just hours after Oklahoma GOP Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed him to the post Tuesday morning at the Oklahoma state Capitol in Oklahoma City. 

Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, who serves as president pro tempore of the Senate, swore in Armstrong. Grassley joined Armstrong and his family in the Old Senate Chamber for a reenactment of the swearing-in shortly after. 

Armstrong has served as executive chairman of the board of directors for Williams. The major energy company is headquartered in Tulsa. 

Armstrong joins Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Lankford in the Senate and will serve alongside him until January 2027 — the remainder of Mullin’s term. 

Under Oklahoma law, Armstrong signed an affidavit earlier Tuesday vowing to not run for a full Senate term in 2026, the Oklahoma Voice reported. 

Earlier in March, Trump gave Oklahoma GOP U.S. Rep. Kevin Hern — who is running in November for the Senate seat — his “complete and total endorsement.” 

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Treasury Department will take over the Department of Education’s responsibility for collecting on defaulted federal student loan debt, President Donald Trump’s administration announced Thursday.

It’s the first step in a multi-phase process that will end with Treasury taking on the entire federal student loan portfolio. It’s also the latest interagency agreement announced by the Education Department. 

A senior Department of Education official cited the agency’s “longstanding partnership” with Treasury in administering federal student aid programs and expressed confidence that the department was in a good position to increase its role. 

The administration continues to take sweeping steps to do away with the 46-year-old Education Department, as Trump seeks to return education “back to the states.” That effort comes despite much of the oversight and funding of schools already occurring at the state and local levels. 

In the first phase, Treasury will also “provide operational support” to the Education Department’s efforts to return borrowers to repayment, per the announcement. 

The Education Department’s student loan portfolio stands at roughly $1.7 trillion. The agency says fewer than 40% of borrowers are in repayment and nearly a quarter are in default. 

In later phases, Treasury is set to “work to provide operational support over non-defaulted Federal student loan debt, to the extent practicable and permitted by law, while also seeking opportunities to provide operational support to FSA’s other functions.” 

The senior Education Department official said that borrowers currently making payments “should see no change” and can expect to see “better customer service.” 

Department forges multiple agreements

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said that “by leveraging Treasury’s world-renowned expertise in finance and economic policy, we are confident that American students, borrowers, and taxpayers will finally have functioning programs after decades of mismanagement,” in a statement Thursday. 

The Education Department has announced nine other agreements with the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Interior and State that transfer several of its responsibilities to those agencies. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court in July 2025 temporarily greenlit mass layoffs and a plan to dramatically downsize the Education Department ordered earlier that year. Those layoffs inflicted a heavy hit on Federal Student Aid, among other units at the agency.  

That plan was outlined in a March 2025 executive order that called on McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of her own department.

‘Irresponsible, reckless’ 

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that “instead of helping student borrowers get the support they need, Secretary McMahon is focused on illegally hollowing out the department she leads and creating new, harmful bureaucracy while she’s at it,” in a statement Thursday.

“Despite all this administration’s talk about creating efficiency, the fact is these agreements simply create pointless new red tape — while threatening basic services and support that students depend on every day,” Murray added.

Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents Education Department workers, lambasted the announcement Thursday.

Gittleman described it as “an insult to the nearly 43 million Americans with federal student loan debt and to the taxpayers who depend on federal oversight to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.”

Gittleman noted that since McMahon took over, “the agency has fired or pushed out nearly half of Federal Student Aid’s workforce, leading to the Government Accountability Office warning that the majority of federal student loan servicers running the government’s $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio have been repeatedly breaking the law without staff oversight.”

The GAO report found that the staffing reductions affected the government’s ability to determine how well student loan servicers are doing their jobs.

Aissa Canchola Bañez, policy director for the advocacy group Protect Borrowers, blasted the administration’s move as “irresponsible, reckless, and bad news for our most vulnerable student loan borrowers.”

She added that “in the midst of a growing affordability crisis where American families are already struggling to make ends meet, this risks driving millions of borrowers further into financial hardship.” 

WASHINGTON — Two top Democrats on a U.S. House panel Tuesday pushed back against “unprecedented” Trump administration guidance that they said essentially encourages states to try to bypass requirements on how they spend federal money intended to help people find job training and support — potentially opening states up to lawsuits.

The Democrats, in a letter provided exclusively to States Newsroom, said the U.S. Department of Labor is urging states to use waivers provided under the main federal workforce development law to disregard statutory requirements on how they spend money for employment activities.

Reps. Bobby Scott of Virginia and Alma Adams of North Carolina — the respective ranking members of the House Committee on Education and Workforce and its Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development — urged Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer to “immediately revoke” the agency’s guidance, issued to state workforce agencies, administrators and other entities back in November. 

One of the main purposes of the workforce law, they observed, is to increase access to jobs for people with disabilities, older people and people who are homeless. The waivers suggested by the department would let states reel back their efforts to serve those groups of people, the Democrats said.

“We are deeply concerned that waiving these requirements under the guise of ‘innovation’ and ‘modernization’ will only incentivize the workforce system to stop doing what it is legally required to do: serve those with barriers to employment,” they wrote.

Five ‘strategic pillars’

The guidance from the department’s Employment and Training Administration calls on states to “request waivers of existing (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act) statutory or regulatory requirements that can help overcome specific barriers to innovation and align with the five strategic pillars for workforce investment.” 

The 2014 law, known as WIOA, aims to boost the public workforce system and help those seeking jobs — particularly people who face barriers to employment — access training, employment and support services. The Labor secretary has the authority to waive certain statutory requirements under WIOA, though with certain limitations. 

Scott and Adams argued that many of the suggested waivers in the guidance “would allow states to reduce their efforts to serve individuals with barriers to employment, directly contradicting WIOA’s purpose.” 

President Donald Trump’s administration in August 2025 unveiled a workforce development strategy, through the departments of Labor, Commerce and Education, consisting of five “strategic pillars.”

The strategy stemmed from Trump’s April 2025 executive order, part of which sought to “consolidate and streamline fragmented Federal workforce development programs that are too disconnected from propelling workers into secure, well-paying, and high-need American jobs.” 

But the Democrats said the use of WIOA’s general waiver authority as a method for achieving the administration’s policy goals surrounding workforce development is without precedent.

“Upon review of all past approved waivers, it is clear that waivers were only used in response to discrete challenges that states or local areas faced in meeting some of the requirements stipulated under WIOA, either because of extenuating circumstances or for individual state efforts at reforms, not to achieve the Administration’s policy goals,” they wrote. 

Scott and Adams instead called on Chavez-DeRemer to work with Congress to pass a bipartisan bill that seeks to modernize WIOA. 

That measure would need to be reintroduced. The House passed it in April 2024, during the previous session of Congress, but the Senate did not.

The Department of Labor confirmed receipt of the letter Wednesday, but did not respond to a message seeking comment on its contents.

WASHINGTON — More than two dozen U.S. House Democrats cast a spotlight Tuesday on a newly installed commemorative plaque for those who defended the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. 

The members — led by New York U.S. Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the U.S. Committee on House Administration — led reporters on a visit to the honorific plaque, displayed on the Senate side of the Capitol close to a West Front entrance.

The plaque, quietly installed earlier in March in an area of the Capitol not usually visited by tourists, garnered criticism for its lack of public visibility, as well as a three-year delay to get it installed. 

The memorial is also at the center of a lawsuit by two police officers who defended the Capitol that day. 

“This is not in a prominent location — the actual law that we passed dictates where the location is — this is not it,” Morelle told States Newsroom. 

Trump pardons

The honorary plaque was installed more than five years after the deadly riot, where a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to block Congress from certifying former President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

Trump in January 2025 pardoned the more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants.

The visitors Tuesday included Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was speaker of the House during the Jan. 6 insurrection and a target of the rioters. 

A 2022 law mandated that an honorific plaque be installed within a year of its enactment and be placed “at a permanent location on the western front of the United States Capitol.” 

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has received flak for delaying the installation. 

Merkley, Tillis push Senate action

The plaque installation came after the Senate in January unanimously agreed to a resolution directing the Architect of the Capitol to “prominently display” the plaque in a “publicly accessible location” in the Capitol’s Senate wing, “until the plaque can be placed in its permanent location.” 

Morelle praised that effort, led by Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, but said “this isn’t a place where visitors will see it,” noting that “tours are not allowed down here” and “this is an emergency exit only.”

The New York Democrat said that if Democrats win back the majority in November, he would do everything he could to “make sure it’s moved to the place it’s supposed to, where Americans will come by and see it and honor the sacrifice of the men and women who defended us that day.” 

Lawsuit

Meanwhile, Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer, and Daniel Hodges, a current Metropolitan Police Department officer, sued the Architect of the Capitol over the plaque installation delay in June 2025. 

Shortly after the plaque was displayed, the two argued on March 10 that their lawsuit should continue.

They said the Architect of the Capitol’s “decision to install the plaque in a part of the Capitol hidden from the public fails to comply with the text law, which requires the memorial to be displayed on the Capitol’s ‘western front,’ an exterior part of the building.” 

WASHINGTON — A group of food stamp recipients sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture this week over its efforts to prohibit the benefits from being used to purchase certain non-nutritious items.

Five consumers enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, brought the lawsuit March 11 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The recipients hail from Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia and are challenging the waivers in those states. 

President Donald Trump’s administration has so far approved waivers in 22 states — part of its Make America Healthy Again agenda — that restrict which items recipients of the federal food assistance program that helps 42 million people can buy with their benefits. 

The restrictions, which range from candy to sugar-sweetened beverages and other processed foods, differ throughout states. 

The agency has described the waivers as a “key step in ensuring that taxpayer dollars provide nutritious options that improve health outcomes within SNAP.” 

But the lawsuit claims that the “practical effect” of the waivers is “to destabilize food access for every SNAP participant in the affected states.” 

The lawsuit argues that the waivers “impose ambiguous and scientifically untethered product restrictions that vary not only by state but, in some instances, by store location.” 

The lawsuit also claims that people with chronic illnesses are “losing access to products they need to manage blood sugar or sustain diets they need to maintain baseline health care needs.” 

“The challenged waivers also create confusion and conflict at the point of sale by depriving SNAP recipients of clear notice about which products remain eligible for purchase,” the lawsuit notes. 

The SNAP recipients are represented by the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of low-income families, individuals and communities, along with the law firm Shinder Cantor Lerner. 

A spokesperson for USDA said Friday the agency would not comment on pending litigation.  

WASHINGTON — Members of a U.S. Senate panel expressed bipartisan consensus Thursday that the country should be cautious of “malign” foreign dollars flowing to American colleges and universities, with some Democrats also arguing recent funding cuts undermine the country’s lead in global research.

The hearing in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on “malign foreign influence in higher education” came as President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have pushed for increased transparency requirements when it comes to foreign gifts and contracts entering these schools.

Higher education institutions receiving federal financial assistance are required to disclose any foreign gifts or contracts valued at or above $250,000 annually. The requirement has been in place since 1986, when the Higher Education Act of 1965 was amended to include the reporting provision, known as Section 117. 

Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and chair of the panel, said college is ultimately “about setting students up for success and they should be our priority, but that priority can be undermined when foreign adversaries attempt to exercise influence on college campuses … inherently threatening national security.” 

A bill that would broaden Section 117 disclosure requirements and lower the reporting threshold from $250,000 to $50,000 passed the House in March 2025. Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Washington state Republican, sponsored the measure. 

Cassidy, who is co-leading a Senate companion bill with North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, called for protecting college campuses through “transparency,” noting that his legislation would be the next step in that effort.  

Thursday’s hearing also came as the administration continues its efforts to dismantle the 46-year-old Education Department, including through a series of interagency agreements that outsource several of its responsibilities to other departments. 

In one of those agreements, the State Department will help Education manage foreign gift and contract reporting under Section 117.  

Research cuts add vulnerabilities

Though Democrats saw a need to root out “malign” foreign influences in higher education, a handful took aim at the administration’s cuts to federal research funding and broader “attacks” on higher education. 

“While I agree that it’s important to stamp out dangerous sources of foreign influence in our higher education system, I think it’s important that we also address how cuts to research funding can increase foreign influence on the global stage and undermine U.S. competitiveness,” said Sen. Angela Alsobrooks.

The Maryland Democrat pointed to the impact of the administration’s cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the country’s premier medical research agency under the Department of Health and Human Services that is headquartered in her state. 

Sen. Tim Kaine pointed to a loss of researchers in the United States as a result of research funding cuts. 

“This administration has canceled billions of dollars in federal research, making many of our researchers vulnerable to being recruited by universities in other countries, not necessarily China, but Canada, the (United Kingdom) and universities in Europe,” the Virginia Democrat said. 

Sen. Patty Murray said she found it “absurd” that Trump and Republicans are “willing to burn billions of dollars a day” in the ongoing war with Iran, when she and many others are fighting “tooth and nail” to get the administration to “release billions of dollars that Congress appropriated to be delivered to our students.”

“It’s not happening, and states like mine are having to routinely file lawsuits,” the Washington state Democrat said, while also calling on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to testify before the panel on the ongoing dismantling efforts. 

Cassidy said the panel was in talks with the department to schedule McMahon’s testimony.

Transparency dashboard

The department’s public transparency dashboard — housed on a portal launched in January where colleges and universities are responsible for disclosing foreign gifts and contracts — also came to the forefront during Thursday’s hearing. 

The dashboard, visualizing four decades of data, offers a snapshot of the foreign funding disclosures submitted by colleges and universities.

At least 559 institutions have disclosed $72.1 billion in foreign gifts and contracts between 1986 and late January 2026, according to the dashboard.

But the current version of the dashboard’s usability is limited by an inability to filter by year.

Robert Daly, senior fellow at the Asia Society and former director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center, told the panel the dashboard’s cumulative nature is one of its “biggest silences.” The tool does not allow the public to see any fluctuation over the years in the amount of money in foreign gifts and contracts received by schools. 

He added that “not only do we need to see how giving from each country is moving over time, we need to be able to distinguish different kinds of giving.” 

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Democrats and education advocates Wednesday marked one year since the U.S. Department of Education initiated sweeping mass layoffs.

Those layoffs set the stage for more unprecedented efforts from President Donald Trump’s administration over the past year to wind down the 46-year-old agency as part of his quest to return education “back to the states.” 

Meanwhile, a new report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the staffing reductions affected the government’s ability to determine how well student loan servicers are doing their jobs.

Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono hosted the press conference outside the U.S. Capitol, joined by fellow Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, along with advocates, to underscore the impact of the mass layoffs and other major cuts on students and families across the country. 

The U.S. Supreme Court in July 2025 temporarily greenlit the mass layoffs, along with Trump’s plan to dramatically downsize the agency, which he had outlined in an executive order signed later in March 2025. 

Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents Education Department workers, said the administration “has shown it will stop at nothing, even ignoring court orders and violating federal law to dismantle the department and sow chaos for students, families, communities and my coworkers.” 

“They will continue to undermine the careers of thousands of dedicated public servants who work every day to support our students and families,” Gittleman added.

The March 2025 Reduction in Force, or RIF, effort, hit wide swaths of the agency, taking heavy hits to units such as the Office for Civil Rights and Federal Student Aid. 

Student loans

Two Government Accountability Office reports — including the one released Wednesday — underscored the impact of the staffing reductions at these two units on the department’s abilities to carry out its key responsibilities. 

In February 2025, FSA “stopped assessing student loan servicers on accuracy and call quality due to lack of staff capacity,” the government watchdog reported.

Between January and December 2025, the department saw a drop in 656 staffers at FSA, according to the report.  

“By not assessing servicer accuracy and call quality, FSA lacks assurance that borrower records are correct and that servicers are giving borrowers quality information,” according to the GAO report.

Civil rights

Another GAO report, released in February, found that the Education Department spent between roughly $28.5 million and $38 million on the salaries and benefits of the hundreds of OCR employees not working between March and December 2025, who were put on paid administrative leave while legal challenges against the administration unfolded. 

The government watchdog found that despite the department resolving more than 7,000 of the over 9,000 discrimination complaints it received between March and September, roughly 90% of the resolved complaints were due to the department dismissing the complaint.

The agency later moved to rescind the RIFs against the OCR employees in early January while legal challenges proceeded. 

“So they wasted taxpayer money while they also tried to undermine the laws of the United States that guarantee civil rights to every student,” Van Hollen said during Wednesday’s press conference.  

Interagency agreements 

Members of Congress and advocates also pushed back against the Education Department’s several interagency agreements with other departments, which transfer many of its responsibilities to Labor, Health and Human Services, Interior and State.

The department has clarified in fact sheets regarding the agreements that it would “maintain all statutory responsibilities” and oversight of the programs involved. 

The effort has drawn strong backlash from Democratic members of Congress, labor unions and advocates.

“Trump is setting these programs up to fail,” Hirono said, adding that by “shoving these programs to departments that do not have the experience or wherewithal to run these programs, he is setting these programs that our kids rely on (up) for failure.” 

Funding increase

Meanwhile, Congress earlier this year rebuked a request from the president to dramatically slash funding for the department as he and his administration seek to dismantle it. 

Trump signed a measure in February that funds the department at $79 billion this fiscal year — roughly $217 million more than the agency’s fiscal 2025 funding level and a whopping $12 billion above what Trump sought.

The spending package does not provide ironclad language to prevent the outsourcing of the department’s responsibilities, but it does direct the department and the agencies part of the transfers to provide biweekly briefings to lawmakers on the implementation of any interagency agreements.

The department did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. 

WASHINGTON — A U.S. Senate panel on Tuesday added to the fierce debate over compensation for student-athletes, with senators and experts agreeing the current system wasn’t working but with different ideas for a path forward.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, hosted a roundtable of experts, leaders and former college and professional athletes to discuss “fixing college sports.”

Cassidy said the “current system is actually hurting the student-athlete.”

“Our effort will be, what do we do to protect the student-athlete?” he continued, adding that approach would also protect universities.

Two of the five panelists Cassidy brought in hailed from Louisiana State University, including Collis Temple Jr., a member of the LSU Board of Supervisors and former basketball star at the university, along with Julie Cromer, executive deputy athletic director and chief operating officer for LSU Athletics. 

The event came on the heels of a White House roundtable last week, where President Donald Trump pledged to imminently deliver an executive order aimed at reshaping college sports. 

Debate over athletes as employees

The college sports world continues to grapple with the fallout from the NCAA’s 2021 guidelines, which allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness. 

A federal judge in June 2025 approved the terms of a nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes.

The rules for name, image and likeness deals vary from state to state.

The college sports landscape is also wrestling with gender inequity in NIL deals and the NCAA’s controversial transfer portal, among other issues.

A bipartisan bill on pause in the U.S. House aims to create a national framework for college athletes’ compensation. It would also prohibit college athletes from being classified as employees while providing broad antitrust immunity to the NCAA and college sports conferences.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, expressed optimism over the bill’s fate during the White House roundtable, saying “we’re right on the verge of passage in the House and we now think we have the votes to do that.” 

But the bill would face a dismal path in the Senate, where Senate Democrats have pushed back against it.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan proposal from GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state would provide “a new antitrust exemption allowing college football institutions to jointly sell media rights” and make it “optional for conferences and schools to pool their media rights together.”

Conversation between schools and athletes needed

Jim Carr, president and CEO of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, said “the implications of student-athletes becoming employees, or a lot of these court decisions that are making it difficult to enforce our rules around what we call education-based athletics, is really — I don’t think it’s an overstatement or being too dramatic to say — critical to not only the NAIA but each of our institutions being able to stay in business on a long-term basis.” 

Carr, whose association includes roughly 250 institutions, said at an average NAIA school, 36% of the students are also athletes.

Sen. Chris Murphy called for collective bargaining, where athletes can “speak for themselves,” noting that Congress should not “micromanage” the relationship between colleges and college athletes. 

“We should just empower the colleges or the conferences and the athletes to have a conversation between themselves,” the Connecticut Democrat said. 

Bernard Dennis III, principal at Jackson Lewis P.C. and an employment and sports law expert, said that if students are classified as employees, “they then become subject to several statutory schemes, not the least of which would be the (Fair Labor Standards Act), which would allow them to be compensated for their work time, for overtime and then it becomes a challenge in what constitutes that.”

He added that “under the law, it would be anything that is required for their work, and so when you have eligibility rules about maintaining a certain GPA, things like that, it becomes not only your time on the field, but does going to class become compensable work time? How do you track that?”

WASHINGTON — American colleges and universities received gifts and contracts worth more than $5.2 billion from foreign entities in 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Education, which also recently published summaries of foreign investment in U.S. higher education dating back to 1986. 

Qatar, the United Kingdom, China, Switzerland, Japan, Germany and Saudi Arabia marked the largest sources of reportable gifts and contracts to U.S. institutions in 2025, according to the agency, which released the latest funding disclosures this month. 

The department also made public roughly 40 years of data on a transparency dashboard that offers a snapshot of the foreign funding disclosures submitted by colleges and universities. The administration described the move as a transparency effort, but critics say it lacks key context. 

The dashboard shows cumulative data since 1986, when Congress amended the Higher Education Act of 1965 to mandate colleges and universities receiving federal financial assistance disclose any foreign gifts or contracts valued at or above $250,000 annually.

The provision, known as Section 117, “came about due to concerns about malign actors trying to either use educational platforms to promote agendas that were not in the national interest or about getting access to American youth or about exerting influence on institutions,” said Rick Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

And while the Education Department this month heralded the dashboard as a major step toward transparency in foreign influence in U.S. education, the tool does not separate gifts and contracts by year, limiting its use to help the public spot trends or identify major gifts.

Details about the gifts and contracts, such as what was given or what work was contracted, are not displayed on the dashboard.

Trump priority

President Donald Trump and his administration have sought to increase transparency requirements when it comes to foreign funds entering U.S. colleges and universities.

Part of the administration’s effort includes an April 2025 executive order that sought to “end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions” and to “safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.” 

The public transparency dashboard is housed on a portal, launched in January, where colleges and universities are responsible for disclosing foreign gifts and contracts. 

The Education Department announced Feb. 23 that it would partner with the State Department on foreign gift and contract reporting under Section 117.

The move — one of several interagency agreements announced so far by the administration — is part of the administration’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the 46-year-old agency. 

State will help the Education Department manage its foreign funding reporting portal and “use its national security and foreign national academic admissions expertise to review and assess the industry’s compliance with the law, share data with the public and federal stakeholders, and identify potential threats,” the Education Department said. 

Nearly $70 billion disclosed 

At least 555 institutions have disclosed $67.6 billion in foreign gifts and contracts between 1986 and mid-December 2025, according to the dashboard.

The institutions that have received the most funding in foreign gifts and contracts since Section 117 was enacted are Harvard University in Massachusetts, at $4.2 billion; Carnegie Mellon University, in Pennsylvania, at $3.9 billion; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at $3.5 billion; Cornell University in New York, at $3.1 billion and the University of Pennsylvania, at $2.8 billion. 

The dashboard also includes a separate section on the total value of transactions in foreign gifts and contracts with “counterparties located in countries of concern,” such as China, Russia and Venezuela. 

The universities that received the most money from counterparties in these “countries of concern” are Harvard, at $610.8 million; MIT, at $490.1 million; New York University, at $462.5 million; Stanford University in California, at $418.5 million; and Yale University in Connecticut, at $400.2 million.  

Concerns from higher ed groups 

Some higher education groups expressed concerns over the dashboard, including limitations they see with how the data is portrayed. 

The cumulative nature of the dashboard does not allow the public to see how the amount of money in foreign gifts and contracts received by schools fluctuated throughout the years. 

“There’s no way to kind of break out what the funding is by the year, or perhaps by the funding cycle, so you can’t really see any funding trends,” Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education, told States Newsroom. 

The association serves as the major coordinating body for the country’s colleges and universities, representing roughly 1,600 institutions. 

Spreitzer emphasized a lack of context throughout the dashboard, including on the list of foreign entities of concern and whether such funding is active or reflects past funding. 

For instance, the U.S. Department of Commerce designated the Chinese tech company Huawei as an entity of concern in 2019.

Huawei has provided roughly $22.7 million in funding to American universities, overall, according to the dashboard. But the dashboard doesn’t show the gifts and contracts all came prior to the entity-of-concern designation, Spreitzer said.

“None of our institutions have taken funding from Huawei since 2019, if not earlier, when we were informed of the concerns around Huawei,” Spreitzer said. “However, the way that the information is presented, it seems to imply that our institutions are still taking funding from Huawei.” 

Spreitzer said that the dashboard “demonstrates that our schools are complying with Section 117 and they are meeting their reporting obligations.”

“I hope that people are not making broad assumptions based on how the data is presented right now,” added Spreitzer, who hopes the administration will continue making improvements to the dashboard, such as separating the disclosures by year and adding additional context.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Democrats threw a spotlight Thursday on President Donald Trump’s attempts to yank funds away from minority-serving institutions, as the administration tries to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies in schools.

Hawaii U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono hosted an unofficial hearing that gathered advocates, leaders, experts and students to sound the alarm on the consequences of cutting funding for the more than 800 MSIs, as they are known, that enroll millions of students of color. Many are from low-income households or are the first in their families to attend college.

Hirono blasted the administration’s broader efforts to end DEI efforts in schools, as well as larger ongoing actions to axe the 46-year-old U.S. Department of Education.  

Trump “has been attacking these programs and is now working to illegally eliminate the programs entirely, not to mention they would like to eliminate the entire federal Department of Education,” she said. 

In September, the department decided to gut and reprogram $350 million in discretionary funds that support minority-serving institutions, over claims that the programs for Black, Asian, Indigenous and Hispanic students and more are “racially discriminatory.”

Soon after, the department moved to redirect $495 million in additional funding to historically Black colleges and universities as well as tribal colleges.

Adding fuel to the fire, the Justice Department issued an opinion in December finding several grant programs for minority-serving institutions to be “unconstitutional.” 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon concurred with that opinion, and the agency said later that month it was “currently evaluating the full impact” of the opinion on affected programs.

‘Plainly cruel’

Mike Hoa Nguyen, associate professor of education and principal investigator for the MSI Data Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, said MSIs are “the backbone of American higher education.” 

Nguyen said these institutions “provide critical pathways to academic opportunity and achievement for millions of students of color, particularly those from low-income households and those who are often the first in their families to go to college.” 

He noted that as a result of the funds being reprogrammed, MSIs have been left “struggling to figure out how to explain the continuity of vital services — services that have been empirically demonstrated to improve student learning, boost academic performance in the classroom and ultimately lead them to graduate.” 

Nguyen added that “these funds are about providing the basic resources so students can learn, grow, succeed and contribute to our society and our economy, and eliminating these resources in general — and in such an abrupt manner — isn’t just misaligned and misguided, it’s plainly cruel.” 

Rowena Tomaneng, president of Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education, said “essential programs nationwide have been shuttered or destabilized” as a consequence of the yanked funding.  

“These programs are not supplemental — they are essential to closing equity gaps for first-generation and low-income students,” said Tomaneng, whose organization advocates for Asian American and Pacific Islander students, faculty and staff across higher education. 

“Their loss will reverse hard-won gains, widen disparities and weaken institutions that serve as gateways to opportunity,” Tomaneng said. 

Senators send letter to McMahon

The hearing came a week after Hirono, along with Sens. Alex Padilla of California, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, led nearly two dozen colleagues in urging McMahon to reverse her department’s decision to unilaterally halt federal funding for MSIs.

“This decision is yet another example of this Administration attempting to circumvent Congress and its obligations to follow the law,” the senators wrote. “Unilaterally deciding that long-standing programs are unconstitutional, absent a ruling from the judiciary, sets a dangerous precedent and disrupts needed support that colleges and students rely on.” 

Meanwhile, Trump signed into law earlier in February a spending package that funds the Education Department at $79 billion this fiscal year.

The measure also “increases funding for all Title III and V programs that support HBCUs, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Tribal colleges, and other minority-serving institutions,” per a summary from Senate Appropriations Committee Democrats. 

Hirono noted that “only Congress can eliminate these programs, and Congress has decided not to do so,” during the hearing. 

“In fact, we provided additional funding for these programs in the fiscal year (20)26 spending bill reiterating our support for them, but of course, the Trump regime doesn’t care about Congress’ priorities,” she said. 

The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. 

WASHINGTON — Some congressional Democrats boycotted President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, opting to attend counter-programming to protest the administration’s actions.

Lawmakers took to alternative stages in Washington, D.C., in rebukes of what they see as Trump’s lack of regard for constitutional norms, immigration enforcement tactics and response to the affordability crisis hitting American families.  

“Our democracy is wilting under ceaseless attack from a president who wants to be a despot,” said Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut at the “People’s State of the Union” rally on the National Mall.

“Millions of Americans are losing their health care because the president has chosen corruption to pad the pockets of his billionaire friends instead of helping average Americans,” said Murphy, who serves as the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee. 

The rally, hosted by progressive media company MeidasTouch and progressive advocacy group MoveOn, countered the president’s address to Congress. Lawmakers brought their own guests to the event, who rebuffed ongoing actions by the administration. 

Tuesday night also featured the “State of the Swamp” at the National Press Club, hosted by DEFIANCE.org, a resistance effort against Trump; the Portland Frog Brigade, a coalition of “artist-activists” and COURIER, an advocacy media network. 

The “State of the Swamp” event brought in several Democratic lawmakers, former Trump administration officials, current and former Democratic state leaders, as well as leading voices against the administration. 

‘A lawless president’

Sen. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, described the State of the Union as a “state of denial” during the event on the National Mall. 

“What’s going to happen under that Capitol is a bunch of lies — lies that Donald Trump and the Republicans are going to tell us about how great this country is doing right now,” he said. “But what is true, what is happening right now, is that Donald Trump and the Republicans have made this country sicker, poorer and less secure.”

Democratic lawmakers continued to blast the administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.

Those criticisms grew even louder after federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens last month in Minneapolis. 

The Department of Homeland Security is shut down as Congress and the administration try to iron out a solution to Democrats’ demands for additional restraints on immigration enforcement following the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

“Now we know the state of our union,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat. “We know it is under attack from a lawless president who is shredding our Constitution and who is attacking our democracy — a president whose private (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) army executes Americans and then calls the victims domestic terrorists.” 

Epstein files

Democrats also lambasted the administration’s handling of the files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which faced criticism for its piecemeal rollout of the files and heavy redactions. 

Several Democratic lawmakers invited survivors of Epstein as their guests to Trump’s State of the Union address. 

“We should be crystal clear about right now what is happening in our country,” said Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, during the rally on the National Mall. 

“We have a president who is leading the single largest government cover-up in modern history — we have the single largest sex trafficking ring in modern history right now being covered up by Donald Trump and (Attorney General) Pam Bondi in the Department of Justice,” Garcia said. 

Trump, who has appeared in several of the files, had a well-documented friendship with Epstein, but has maintained he had a falling-out with the disgraced financier and was never involved in any alleged crimes.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration took more steps Monday to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, announcing two additional interagency agreements with other departments that will transfer more of its responsibilities to those agencies.

Under the agreements, the agency will partner with the State Department on foreign gift and contract reporting and with the Department of Health and Human Services on family engagement and school support programs.

The 46-year-old department signed seven other interagency agreements in 2025 as part of an ongoing effort to dismantle itself, including with State and HHS, as well as Labor and Interior. 

“As we continue to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states, our new partnerships with the State Department and HHS represent a practical step toward greater efficiency, stronger coordination, and meaningful improvement,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. 

Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents Education Department workers, blasted the additional interagency agreements in a Monday statement. 

McMahon “is unlawfully dismantling the Education Department by moving programs and offices to other federal agencies despite a clear warning from Congress that she lacks the authority to do so,” Gittleman said. 

She added that “these moves come as the Trump Administration has attempted to fire large numbers of career public servants in these very offices — and is now trying to shift their critical work across multiple federal agencies with no educational expertise.”

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, also lambasted the announcement.

“These illegal agreements aren’t just creating pointless new bureaucracy that burdens our already-overworked teachers and schools,” she said in a statement Monday. “They are actively jeopardizing resources and support that students and families count on and are entitled to under the law.”

Foreign gifts and contracts

The Education Department clarified in fact sheets that in both agreements, it would “maintain all statutory responsibilities” and oversight of the programs involved. 

Under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, colleges and universities receiving federal financial assistance are required to disclose any foreign gifts or contracts valued above $250,000 annually. 

Under the agreement, State will help the Education Department in managing its foreign funding reporting portal, where colleges and universities are responsible for disclosing such transactions. 

State will also “use its national security and foreign national academic admissions expertise to review and assess the industry’s compliance with the law, share data with the public and federal stakeholders, and identify potential threats,” the Education Department said. 

HHS portfolio grows

Under the agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS will take on a “growing role” in administering several programs that are currently housed under the Education Department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. 

The programs include the School Emergency Response to Violence (Project SERV), School Safety National Activities, Ready to Learn Programming, Full-Service Community Schools, Promise Neighborhoods and Statewide Family Engagement Centers, the Education Department said. 

The School Emergency Response to Violence program helps schools recover from a violent event, according to the department. 

Ready to Learn Programming “supports the development of educational television and digital media targeted at preschool and early elementary school children and their families,” according to the department.  

The Full-Service Community Schools program offers academic, social and health services for students in high-poverty areas and their families. 

According to the department, a Promise Neighborhood is a “place-based, collective impact approach to improving results for children and families.” The program aims to make it so that participating children “have access to great schools and strong systems of family and community support.”

The Statewide Family Engagement Centers program seeks to provide financial assistance to organizations helping state and local educational agencies to improve family engagement.

Abolishing the department

Since taking office, Trump has sought to take an axe to the agency in his quest to move education “back to the states.” The U.S. Supreme Court in July 2025 temporarily greenlit mass layoffs and a plan to dramatically downsize the Education Department ordered earlier that year.

That plan, outlined in a March 2025 executive order signed by Trump, called on McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of her own department.

Meanwhile, Congress earlier this year rebuked Trump’s request to dramatically slash funding for the department as he and his administration seek to do away with it.

Trump signed a measure earlier in February that funds the department at $79 billion this fiscal year — roughly $217 million more than the agency’s fiscal 2025 funding level and a whopping $12 billion above what Trump sought.

Though the spending package does not offer ironclad language to prevent the outsourcing of the Education Department’s responsibilities to other agencies, the measure does direct the Education Department and the agencies that are part of the transfers to provide biweekly briefings to lawmakers on the implementation of any interagency agreements.

WASHINGTON — Tributes poured in across the country for the revered civil rights figure the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., who died Tuesday morning at 84.

The two-time Democratic presidential hopeful and Greenville, South Carolina, native died peacefully, surrounded by his kin, according to his family. 

Jackson, who was active in the civil rights movement as a college student, worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a young adult before King’s 1968 assassination.

Leading his own political movement, Jackson became known for his populist message, charismatic delivery and organizing prowess that elevated the role and influence of Black political leaders and helped shape the modern Democratic Party.

“Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” Jackson’s family said in a statement. 

“We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family,” his family added. “His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, ordered flags to fly at half-staff Tuesday in Jackson’s honor in the state where he lived and worked for many years.

The family statement did not list a cause of death. Jackson was diagnosed in 2013 with Parkinson’s disease. His diagnosis was updated last year to progressive supranuclear palsy, according to a November statement from the Rainbow PUSH Coalition that Jackson founded.

Tributes from Obama, Trump and Biden

Former President Barack Obama, the first Black president, and his wife, Michelle Obama, said Jackson’s runs for the presidency “laid the foundation” for Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign. And Chicago native Michelle Obama’s “first glimpse of political organizing” was at the Jacksons’ kitchen table, they said.

“From organizing boycotts and sit-ins, to registering millions of voters, to advocating for freedom and democracy around the world, he was relentless in his belief that we are all children of God, deserving of dignity and respect,” they wrote. “Reverend Jackson also created opportunities for generations of African Americans and inspired countless more, including us.”

President Donald Trump paid tribute, dubbing Jackson “a force of nature like few others before him” and a “good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts,’” in a social media post Tuesday.  

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, honored Jackson as a “legendary voice for the voiceless, powerful civil rights champion and trailblazer extraordinaire,” in a social media post. 

“For decades, while laboring in the vineyards of the community, he inspired us to keep hope alive in the struggle for liberty and justice for all,” the New York Democrat said.

Jeffries expressed gratitude for Jackson’s “incredible service” to the country and “profound sacrifice as the people’s champion.” 

Former President Joe Biden called Jackson “a man of God and of the people. Determined and tenacious. Unafraid of the work to redeem the soul of our Nation.” 

South Carolina legacy

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and longtime friend of Jackson, said the civil rights leader lived a life “defying odds,” in a statement Tuesday.  

“Reverend Jackson showed us that if we all work together – we can bend the arc of the moral universe and change history,” Clyburn said while also pointing to Jackson’s impact on “the nation, Black Americans, and movements to encourage civic participation around the world.” 

U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican who is the party’s highest-ranking Black elected official, honored Jackson’s legacy as a leader and role model.

“I don’t have to agree with someone politically to deeply respect the role Jesse Jackson, a South Carolina native, played in uplifting Black voices and inspiring young folks to believe their voices mattered,” Scott wrote on social media. “Those that empower people to stand taller always leave a lasting mark. Rest in peace.”

Jackson’s legacy will live on in the next generation, South Carolina state Sen. Deon Tedder said during a news conference Tuesday. 

“The future generation, they’re picking up that torch, they’re picking up that mantle,” said Tedder, a Democrat, gesturing to students from the state’s historically Black colleges and universities. “The baton has been passed, and now what you see is the future.”

South Carolina state Rep. Hamilton Grant recalled seeing Jackson at the July 9, 2015, signing ceremony of the law that removed the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds entirely. The flag was taken down the next day, 15 years after it came off the Statehouse dome in a compromise Jackson opposed. 

“For him, being from South Carolina, to see that moment, and me being there in close proximity with him, meant the world to me,” Grant told the South Carolina Daily Gazette. He said Jackson paved the way for Black leaders like him and helped instill in him pride in his identity.

The South Carolina House and Senate held moments of silence in Jackson’s honor Tuesday. 

“There are so many little boys and little girls in South Carolina who can look in the mirror now and say, ‘I am somebody!’ because of this native son,” state Sen. Karl Allen, a Democrat, said.

Shaping Democratic politics

Jackson leaves behind a legacy of political and social justice work that spanned decades. 

He founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a national social justice organization whose name evoked Jackson’s multiracial voter base and the theme of his 1984 Democratic National Convention speech. That organization was formed by a merger between Operation PUSH, which Jackson founded in 1971, and the Rainbow Coalition.

In his 1988 bid for the presidency, Jackson based his campaign in Iowa prior to that state’s presidential caucuses and made the official announcement of his candidacy at a farm in Greenfield on Oct. 10, 1987. 

He finished in fourth place in the caucuses but went on to briefly become the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination by winning a coalition of Black and Latino voters and white liberals, though he ultimately came in second in delegates to Michael Dukakis. 

Similar blocs propelled Obama to victory two decades later and continue to form national Democrats’ base.

Two of Jackson’s sons, Jesse Jackson Jr. and Jonathan Jackson, would represent Illinois in the U.S. House. Jonathan Jackson remains in office after first winning election in 2022.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist from Vermont who endorsed Jackson’s 1988 campaign, said in a Tuesday statement Jackson had been a friend and ally for nearly 40 years and credited Jackson with founding modern progressivism.

“His creation of the Rainbow Coalition, a revolutionary idea at the time, that developed a grassroots movement of working people — Black, white, Latino, Asian-American, Native-American, gay and straight — laid the foundation for the modern progressive movement which is continuing to fight for his vision of economic, racial, social and environmental justice,” Sanders wrote. “Jackson has had a profound impact upon our country. His politics of togetherness and solidarity should guide us going forward.”

‘Equal justice is not inevitable’

Georgia U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat and a Baptist pastor, recalled the influence Jackson’s presidential runs had on a young Warnock growing up in public housing.

“With an eloquence and rhythmic rhetoric all his own, Jesse Jackson reminded America that equal justice is not inevitable,” he said. “It requires vigilance and commitment, and for freedom fighters, sacrifice. His ministry was poetry and spiritual power in the public square. He advanced King’s dream and bent the arc of history closer to justice.”

Jaime Harrison, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said Jackson’s 1988 run, which culminated with a speech at the party convention that lauded the United States’ multiracial identity, inspired him.

As “a poor Black kid from South Carolina,” Harrison said he was drawn to Jackson’s command of the convention hall after accumulating more than 1,000 delegates.

“He did not win the nomination,” Harrison wrote. “But he won our imagination.”

Adrian Ashford contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security is headed for a shutdown as lawmakers on Capitol Hill remained stuck Thursday over bans on face masks and other immigration tactics. 

The department’s funding expires Friday night.

A procedural vote to advance a funding bill failed in the Senate, 52-47, with Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., the only Democrat to join Republicans on the measure. Senate Majority Leader John Thune changed his vote in a maneuver to recommit the bill and bring it up again later. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., did not vote.

The Senate then left for a scheduled recess over the Presidents Day holiday, and will not return for votes until Feb. 23.

Democrats have so far rebuffed counter proposals from the White House and a Republican offer to further extend temporary DHS funding while negotiations continue. 

The vote came just hours after President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan announced immigration officers will retreat from Minneapolis, which has become ground zero for the administration’s aggressive and deadly escalations that sparked mass protests and sinking approval numbers for the president.

Thune said the administration’s exit from Minneapolis is “certainly a demonstration of good faith.”

Demands for warrants and more

The fatal shootings in Minneapolis by federal agents of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens, has prompted Democrats to demand immigration officers obtain judicial warrants to forcibly enter homes, wear and actively use body cameras, remove face masks, wear identification and undergo additional training.

The department, which houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is the remaining part of the government for which Congress has not passed full-year funding. In addition to ICE and Customs and Border Protection, the department also includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration, otherwise known as TSA.

Short-term stopgap funds for the department expire Friday at midnight, though ICE will likely continue operations on an influx of cash earmarked for the agency in Republicans’ massive tax and spending cuts law enacted in July.

TSA agents, Coast Guard personnel and other essential government workers will continue their duties without pay until lawmakers strike a deal. Others will be sent home, also without pay, though all will receive back pay once the shutdown ends.

Red lines

Thune said Democrats “don’t seem to want to play ball” and consider his party’s “reasonable efforts and requests.”

“There’s some obviously red lines that Democrats have and that the White House has. I think Republicans, as I told you before, are very interested in making sure that law enforcement officials continue to be able to do their jobs in a way that is safe and that we aren’t in any way enabling, you know, dangerous illegal aliens, or disallowing them being detained and deported from the country,” the South Dakota Republican said following the failed vote.

Thune said the White House is “giving more and more ground on some of these key issues” but declined to provide further detail on the administration’s proposal.

He added he did not plan to cancel the Senate’s planned recess next week but has let members know they’ll need to be available if a deal emerges.

“I’m encouraged to hear that they’re actually going to put together another counterproposal. I think if people are operating in good faith and actually want a solution … this can get done,” he said.

Following the failed vote for full-year funding, Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., asked for unanimous consent to keep Homeland Security open with another stop-gap measure.

“Let’s keep talking, let’s keep working. Don’t let anyone miss a paycheck,” Britt, the chair of the Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee, said.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee, objected, saying the Democrats want “to rein in  ICE’s lawlessness.” 

Democrats want GOP to get ‘serious’

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer doubled down on Democrats’ demands following the failed procedural vote. 

“This vote today asked a simple question: Will you rein in ICE’s abuses, or will you vote to extend the chaos?” he said. “Republicans chose chaos and the Democrats, we refused — Republicans chose to put a bill on the floor that ignored the abuses, ignored the outrage, ignored what the American people want, overwhelmingly, and they failed to get the votes to avoid a shutdown at DHS.” 

The New York Democrat called on Republicans to get “serious” if they want to keep DHS funded. 

“They need to sit down, they need to negotiate in good faith, produce legislation that actually reins in ICE and stops the violence,” Schumer said. 

Both sides have complained that the other did not work fast enough during the past two weeks to find a deal.

“I wish our Republican colleagues in the White House had shown more seriousness from the start, but Senate Democrats have been clear that we have all taken an oath, an oath to uphold the law of the country and this Department of Homeland Security, this ICE, is out of control. They are tear gassing our children’s schools. They are killing American citizens. They are disappearing legal migrants,” Murphy said. 

Ahead of Thursday’s vote, Murphy said Democrats would not fund the department until an agreement is reached with the White House to “reform abusive practices of ICE.” 

Murphy told reporters the White House is “obviously trying to get us to fund the department,” pointing to the announcement of immigration officers soon leaving Minneapolis. 

“If we fund ICE, because we believe that the drawdown is meaningful, they’ll just pocket that money and show up in another city two weeks from now,” he said. “We need statutory changes to stop them from the abuse, or they will be quiet for a couple of weeks and show up in Philadelphia on April 1.” 

Thune said “the ball is in Democrats’ court,” during remarks on the Senate floor Thursday morning. 

“Are they going to shut down the Department of Homeland Security — which would be their second shutdown this fiscal year — or are they going to allow for the time to negotiate with the White House and get agreement on a final bill?” he said.

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Democrats on Wednesday rebuked ongoing efforts from President Donald Trump’s administration to dismantle the Department of Education, including moves to shift some of its core functions to other agencies. 

Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia — who hosted a spotlight forum alongside several colleagues — said “over and over again, the administration has circumvented the law to hamstring the future of public education without the consent of Congress or the American people.” 

Scott, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Education and Workforce, brought in education advocates and legal voices pushing back against the administration’s ongoing attempts to axe the agency. 

The lawmakers and witnesses expressed particular alarm over the administration’s six interagency agreements, or IAAs, announced with four other departments in November 2025 that transfer several of its responsibilities to those Cabinet-level agencies.

‘Illegal’ transfers 

Ashley Harrington, senior policy counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, said that “while these agencies all provide important services for our nation, none of them are adequately prepared to take on the massive portfolio of programs that these interagency agreements strip from (the Education Department).” 

Harrington, who previously served as a senior adviser at the department, pointed to a “lack” of institutional knowledge at the four departments compared with career employees at the Education Department who have gained expertise from spending decades running the affected programs. 

Rachel Homer, director of Democracy 2025 and senior attorney at Democracy Forward, the legal advocacy group that is leading the ongoing case challenging the department’s dismantling efforts in federal court, pointed out that Congress creates and decides which agencies exist. 

“Congress charges those agencies with performing certain functions, Congress determines the mission of those agencies, and the executive branch’s obligation is to carry that out, is to implement those laws faithfully,” said Homer, who previously served as chief of staff of the Office of the General Counsel at the department. 

The advocacy group is representing a broad coalition in a legal challenge against the administration’s attempts to gut the agency. 

That challenge, consolidated with a similar suit brought by Democratic attorneys general, was expanded in November in the wake of the interagency agreement announcement to include objections to those restructuring efforts. 

“These transfers through the IAAs, they’re illegal,” Homer added. “That’s not what Congress has set up — that’s not how Congress has instructed the agencies to function.” 

Mass layoffs, downsizing 

Meanwhile, the administration’s attempts to wind down the department have also included mass layoffs initiated in March 2025 and a plan to dramatically downsize the agency ordered that same month. The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily greenlit these efforts in July.

Trump has sought to end the 46-year-old agency as part of his quest to send education “back to the states.” This effort comes while much of the oversight and funding of schools already occurs at the state and local levels. 

“I know I don’t just speak for myself when I say I can’t believe we’re here having to actually defend the existence of the Department of Education,” said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education.

“As Education committee members, we came here to work on improving education and opening doors of opportunity and addressing the civil rights disparities, but here we are having to defend the actual existence of the Department of Education,” the Oregon Democrat said. 

Civil rights in the spotlight 

Employees at the Office for Civil Rights — tasked with investigating civil rights complaints from students and families — were targeted in March as part of a broader Reduction in Force, or RIF, effort and put on paid administrative leave while legal challenges against the administration unfolded. 

Though the agency moved to rescind the RIF against the OCR employees in early January while legal challenges proceeded, a Government Accountability Office report released earlier in February found that the Education Department spent between roughly $28.5 million and $38 million on the salaries and benefits of the hundreds of OCR employees who were not working between March and December 2025. 

The government watchdog also found that despite the department resolving more than 7,000 of the over 9,000 discrimination complaints it received between March and September, roughly 90% of the resolved complaints were due to the department dismissing the complaint. 

“We’re extremely concerned of what this means for OCR to actually uphold its statutorily defined duty of protecting the civil rights of students in schools, including the rights of Black students, other students of color, girls, women, students with disabilities and members that identify with the LGBTQI+ communities,” said Ray Li, a policy counsel at the Legal Defense Fund.

Li, who previously served as an attorney for OCR, called on Congress to ensure that the unit “remains in a functioning Department of Education” and not transferred to the Department of Justice or another agency. 

He also urged Congress to provide “adequate funding for OCR” and to “play an important role in transparency, sending oversight request letters to get information on the quantity of complaints that are being received, the types of discrimination that they allege, how OCR is processing those complaints and what the basis of dismissals are.”

The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. 

President Donald Trump gives a speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21, 2026. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Education reinforced the right to prayer in public schools in guidance issued Thursday.

Under the guidance to state and local education agencies, students, teachers and school officials have “a right to pray in school as an expression of individual faith, as long as they’re not doing so on behalf of the school,” the department said. 

President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to protect religious liberty in public schools and beyond, and a growing number of GOP state legislators have tried to infuse Christianity in public education. 

Trump announced the guidance during remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, calling the move a “big deal.” 

The president predicted that Democrats would sue over the guidance, but said he was confident his administration would win any legal challenge. 

The guidance also makes clear that “public schools may not sponsor prayer nor coerce or pressure students to pray.”

In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school-sponsored prayer in public schools violates the Constitution. 

The new guidance calls on school officials to “allow the individuals who make up a public school community to act and speak in accordance with their faith, provided they do not invade the rights of others, the school does not itself participate in religious action or speech as an institution, and the school does not favor secular over religious views or one religious view over another.” 

The guidance leans on a handful of recent Supreme Court rulings surrounding religious expression and religious freedom in public schools, such as Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which found that the actions of a Washington state high school football coach who prayed at the 50-yard line after games were constitutionally protected. 

The Education Department is required by law to periodically reissue guidance on prayer in schools, according to the department.

Trump had previewed Thursday’s guidance while speaking in September 2025 at a Religious Liberty Commission hearing. 

The president established that commission in May 2025 in an effort to “safeguard and promote America’s founding principle of religious freedom.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the administration is “proud to stand with students, parents, and faculty who wish to exercise their First Amendment rights in schools across our great nation,” in a statement alongside the announcement.

“Our Constitution safeguards the free exercise of religion as one of the guiding principles of our republic, and we will vigorously protect that right in America’s public schools,” she said. 

The funding package President Donald Trump signed Feb. 3, 2026, includes $79 billion for the U.S. Education Department, representing a rejection by Congress of the president's plan to close the department. (Photo by kali9/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s attempts to dramatically slash funding for the U.S. Department of Education amid a broader push to dismantle the agency hit a major roadblock this week in the form of bipartisan approval of a spending law that gives the department a small raise. 

The president signed a measure that funds the department at $79 billion this fiscal year — roughly $217 million more than the agency’s fiscal year 2025 funding levels and a whopping $12 billion above what Trump wanted. 

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, wrote in a social media post after the signing that the law was a direct rebuke of several Trump priorities, including eliminating the department.

“Our funding bills send a message to Trump,” she wrote. “Congress will NOT abolish the Department of Education.”

The measure also rejects efforts to dramatically reduce or fully slash funding for a host of programs administered by the department for low-income and disadvantaged students. 

Trump and his administration have sought over the past year to take an axe to the 46-year-old agency as part of a quest to send education “back to the states.” Much of the funding and oversight of schools already occurs at the state and local levels. 

Those dismantling efforts included six interagency agreements with four other departments in November that would shift several Education responsibilities to those Cabinet-level agencies. 

The department also saw mass layoffs initiated in March 2025 and a plan to dramatically downsize the agency ordered that same month — efforts that the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily greenlit in July. 

The spending package also holds full-year funding for the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, State and Treasury. The measure includes a two-week stopgap measure for the Department of Homeland Security. 

‘Inefficiencies’ 

The measure does not offer ironclad language to prevent the outsourcing of the Education Department’s responsibilities to other agencies — despite efforts from Senate Democrats to block such transfers. 

However, in a joint explanatory statement alongside the measure, lawmakers expressed alarm over the “assignment of such programmatic responsibilities to agencies that do not have experience, expertise, or capacity to carry out these programs and activities and lack developed relationships and communications with relevant stakeholders, including States.”

Lawmakers added they were “concerned that fragmenting responsibilities for education programs across multiple agencies will create inefficiencies, result in additional costs to the American taxpayer, and cause delays and administrative challenges in Federal funding reaching States, school districts, and schools.”

Due to those concerns, the funding measure directs the Education Department and the agencies that are part of the transfers to provide biweekly briefings to lawmakers on the implementation of any interagency agreements.

The briefings are supposed to include information on “staffing transfers, implementation costs, metrics on the delivery of services” and the “availability of technical support for programs to grantees,” among other matters. 

The Education Department clarified when announcing the interagency agreements in November with the departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services and State that it would “maintain all statutory responsibilities and will continue its oversight of these programs.” 

‘Necessary’ staffing levels 

The funding agreement also mandates that the department “support staffing levels necessary to fulfill its statutory responsibilities including carrying out programs, projects, and activities funded in (the law) in a timely manner.” 

The department took heat last summer when it froze $6.8 billion in funds for K-12 schools and informed states just a day before the money is typically sent out. 

The funds were eventually unfrozen, following bipartisan pushback in Congress.  

Pell Grant spared 

The measure also maintains the total maximum annual award for the Pell Grant from the prior fiscal year at $7,395, according to a summary from Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee. The government subsidy helps low-income students pay for college. 

Trump’s budget request called for cutting nearly $1,700 from the maximum award for the 2026-2027 award year, a proposal that stoked alarm last year from leading House and Senate appropriators in both parties overseeing Education Department funding. 

Funding levels maintained for TRIO, GEAR UP 

The administration also called for defunding the Federal TRIO programs and the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, or GEAR UP, in fiscal 2026 — a move rejected in the measure.

The Federal TRIO Programs include federal outreach and student services programs to help support students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and GEAR UP aims to prepare low-income students for college.

Appropriators maintained funding for the programs at fiscal 2025 levels — with $1.191 billion for TRIO and $388 million for GEAR UP, per the Senate Democrats’ summary.

The administration also sought to axe funding for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program, which, according to the Education Department, “supports the participation of low-income parents in postsecondary education through the provision of campus-based child care services.” 

Instead, the measure allocates $75 million for the program. 

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment on the funding package.

The administration expressed its support for the entire, multi-bill package, in a Jan. 29 statement of administration policy that barely mentioned the education provisions.

Brent Ganger, far left, and Luke Ganger, second from left, brothers of Renee Good, watch a forum on Department of Homeland Security use of force organized by congressional Democrats on Feb. 3, 2026. Good was killed by a federal immigration officer Jan. 7. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — Renee Good’s family, distraught and in disbelief over her killing, took some comfort in the past few weeks thinking her death might prompt change in the country, her brother Luke Ganger said Tuesday. 

“It has not,” Ganger told congressional Democrats at a forum on the disproportionate use of force by U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents. “The deep distress our family feels because of (Renee’s) loss in such a violent and unnecessary way is complicated by feelings of disbelief, distress and desperation for change.”

Brent Ganger, another brother of Good, also appeared at the forum, saying Good “had a way of showing up in the world that made you believe things were going to be okay.”

Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, was fatally shot by a federal agent Jan. 7 in Minneapolis. 

Her death prompted widespread outcry over the immigration enforcement tactics of President Donald Trump’s administration. 

“The completely surreal scenes taking place on the streets of Minneapolis are beyond explanation,” Luke Ganger said. “This is not just a bad day or a rough week or isolated incidents — these encounters with federal agents are changing the community and changing many lives, including ours, forever.” 

Backlash over the administration’s immigration efforts grew even louder after federal agents fatally shot 37-year-old Alex Pretti, also a U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis on Jan. 24. 

Administration officials have defended the immigration crackdown, including the aggressive tactics used in Minneapolis and other cities.

“The president is never going to waver in enforcing our nation’s immigration laws and protecting the public safety of the American people in his ardent support of” Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.

First-hand accounts

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Rep. Robert Garcia of California hosted the forum. More than 20 Democrats in the House and Senate joined them. 

The unofficial forum is one of several events put on by congressional Democrats, who are in the minority in both chambers, over the past year to protest a host of actions from the administration. 

Three witnesses across Illinois, Minnesota and California — all U.S. citizens — offered harrowing accounts of their encounters with immigration agents in recent months, detailing the trauma, fear and mental distress as a result. 

Marimar Martinez was shot five times by an immigration agent in Chicago. Aliya Rahman, a Minneapolis resident with autism and a traumatic brain injury, was dragged out of her car by agents while on her way to a doctor’s appointment and said she was later refused medical care in DHS detention. And Martin Daniel Rascon was shot at by agents while traveling in a car with family members. 

“Why do we continue to wait for more public executions when we have already seen the evidence in our TVs and computer screens?” Martinez asked the panel. “We have heard the testimonies, we have watched the pain unfold in real time — how many more lives must be lost before meaningful action is taken?”

The meeting came the same day the House passed, and Trump later signed, a funding package that includes a two-week stopgap measure for DHS, as Congress and the administration try to iron out a solution to Democrats’ demands for additional restraints on immigration enforcement following Pretti’s death. 

Many Democrats in Congress have vowed not to support a Department of Homeland Security funding bill that does not include such restraints. Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate committee that oversees the Department of Homeland Security, made that explicit Tuesday.

“Some day we should have a truth and justice commission to investigate the systematic failing,” he said. “But for right now, I can promise that I will not support another dime for the Department of Homeland Security unless there is this fundamental, far-reaching reform and restraint in effect — a rebuilding of the agency.” 

Report blames DHS tactics for fatalities

Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released a report ahead of the hearing Tuesday on Democrats’ findings regarding the deaths of Good and Pretti.

The report claims that the administration’s “extreme policies, violent tactics, and culture of impunity led to the killings.”

The report also argues that “the available evidence suggests that the Trump Administration is attempting to cover up misconduct” and is also “continuing its cover-up by impeding thorough and impartial investigations into the shootings.” 

“We’re seeing ICE, CBP, other parts of DHS, all across our country, terrorize communities,” Garcia said at the forum, pointing to warrantless searches, arrests and detainments of individuals with no prior criminal history and people being sent to detention centers and released without explanation. 

“Now, American citizens — innocent people — have been brutalized … and to be clear, we’ve seen people dragged from cars, beaten, gassed, attacked with crowd-control weapons, blinded, like back in my home state of California, left with broken ribs, run off the road, beaten, injured, disfigured and shot,” he said.