Last Week in Congress (9/7 - 9/11/26)
An update will be shared every week that Congress is in session. This will include a short summary of the past week in Congress, as well as a listing of all education-related bills introduced in the House and Senate, relevant Committee and Floor activity, and education-related hearings.
A little federal-spending-transparency news for your Monday:
Last week, the President signed H.R. 2069, the Stop Secret Spending Act of 2025, into law. The law amends the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 to expand the federal expenditures reported through USAspending.gov to include “other transaction agreements” (OTAs)—agreements that fall outside the government’s traditional procurement contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements.
The legislation goes beyond OTAs. Treasury and OMB must establish requirements designed to ensure that agencies’ spending data are complete and accurate, and inspectors general at specified agencies must periodically report to Congress—and publicly—on the quality of agency spending data and compliance with federal data standards. Those IG reporting requirements continue for up to ten years.
That last piece is particularly interesting in the education space.
Over the past year, the Department of Education has increasingly relied on interagency agreements to have other federal agencies perform functions associated with ED programs. Those arrangements now involve the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Justice, State, Interior, and Treasury, among others. ED’s own Inspector General has already identified oversight of grant-program services performed through IAAs as a management challenge, while emphasizing that ED retains its statutory responsibilities for the affected programs.
The new law does not make those IAAs “other transaction agreements.” But its broader focus on who reports federal spending, whether that data is complete and accurate, and how agency inspectors general evaluate spending data raises an interesting question: as more of the operational work associated with Department of Education programs is distributed across other federal agencies, what will transparent reporting of Education Department spending actually look like?
When one agency owns the appropriation and statutory responsibility, but another agency is administering, managing, collecting, enforcing, or otherwise supporting the program, following the federal dollars—and determining which agency's data tells the full story—gets considerably more complicated.
· H.R. 13014 (Gottheimer, D-NJ), to direct the Secretary of Education to conduct a study on the efforts of States, local educational agencies, and public elementary and secondary schools to education students about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (Education and Workforce).
· H.R. 10315 (Gottheimer, D-NJ), to direct the Secretary of Education to carry out a grant program to support the establishment and expansion of curricula in artificial intelligence in elementary and secondary schools (Education and Workforce).
· H.R. 10326 (Van Drew (R-NJ), the Preventing Rip-offs and Obtaining Oversight of Funds (PROOF) Act, to enhance information-sharing capabilities between Federal law enforcement and State agencies to detect, investigate, and prosecute fraud in certain Federal programs (including elementary and secondary school emergency relief grants under the CARES Act, Covid Relief, and American Rescue Plan Act), and to protect individual privacy (Judiciary).
· H.R. 10330 (Adams, D-NC), the Higher Education Oversight for Nonprofits Ensuring Standards and Transparency Act, to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to impose restrictions on university tax inquiries and examinations (Ways and Means).
· H.R. 10333 (Dingell, D-MI), to support national training, technical assistance, and resource centers, to ensure that all individuals with significant expressive communication disabilities have access to the augmentative and alternative communication the individuals need to interact with others, in order to learn, work, socialize, and take advantage of all aspects of life in the United States (Education and Workforce).
· H.R. 10347 (Stevens, D-MI), the Data Science and Literacy Act of 2026, to direct the Secretary of Education to make grants for the purpose of increasing access to data literacy education (Education and Workforce).
· On September 8, the House filed reports on: H.R. 5634, to amend title 38, United States Code, to provide for a limitation on the amount of entitlement to educational assistance payable for flight training under the Post-9/11 Educational Assistance Program of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with an amendment (H. Rept. 119–796); H.R. 8781, to clarify that for purposes of Federal nondiscrimination requirements applicable to education programs or activities receiving Federal financial assistance, discrimination prohibited under title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is based on the biological reality of sex, with an amendment (H. Rept. 119–798); H.R. 9203, to increase the transparency of colleges and universities in carrying out their civil rights responsibilities, and for other purposes, with an amendment (H. Rept. 119–800).