The Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) extends its sincere appreciation to our allies on Capitol Hill who have maintained the $50 million in funding for the HBCU, TCU and MSI Research and Development Grants program despite the program not being funded in the House appropriations bill and only being funded at $25 million in the Senate version of the bill. We will continue to advocate for increases in funding for this essential program and, most importantly, the reintroduction and passage of the IGNITE HBCU Excellence Act which would help codify these critical investments that build upon the research capacity of not only HBCUs and PBIs, but our nation as a whole.
Additionally, we are appreciative that Title III programs at HBCUs are proposed to receive a total increase of more than $5 million despite negotiated budget constraints that have negatively impacted other programs across the federal government.
Despite the aforementioned successes, we are quite disappointed that this appropriations bill does not build upon the prior momentum towards doubling funding for the Pell Grant program and only maintains the current maximum award. This is an essential source of funding to help our students persist towards graduation and it is imperative that future appropriations bills increase the pool of funds available for this purpose. We are relieved, however, that the bill did not include the provisions in the House Labor-HHS Appropriations Bill which proposed the extreme measure of eliminating both the Federal Supplemental Equal Opportunity Grant (FSEOG) Program and the Federal Work-Study Program. Our relief that we avoided a catastrophe for low-income students, however, does not belie the fact that holding these programs at flat funding in our current inflationary environment effectively serves as a cut to their buying power.
Despite the Minibus bill being far from perfect, we encourage Congress to quickly pass and for President Biden to sign the bill to maintain all of these critical investments.
TMCF looks forward to working with Congressional leadership on both sides of the aisle, the Congressional Black Caucus and the Bipartisan HBCU Caucus to ensure that investments in our students and institutions are once again prioritized during the FY ’25 budgeting process.
