Month: January 2022

Capitol Hill Update

Both chambers of Congress will return to kick off the February legislative session this week. The Senate will return first later today and will primarily focus on clearing the queue of President Joe Biden’s pending nominations. On the House side, lawmakers are scheduled to resume legislative business tomorrow and consider legislation that seeks to end mandatory, pre-dispute arbitration for sexual assault and harassment disputes (H.R. 4445). Members are also slated to take up the America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology, and Economic Strength (America COMPETES) Act (text; fact sheet; section-by-section) at some point next week after leadership introduced the package on Wednesday. More than 500 Amendments to the America COMPETES Act were filed late last week, and the Rules Committee will meet on Tuesday to consider a rule for the measure.

Late last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) provided lawmakers with an update on the chamber’s schedule for next month. At the top of the list is government funding for fiscal year (FY) 2022, as Congress has less than a month until the February 18 deadline. Leadership has expressed optimism that appropriators can reach an agreement on an omnibus spending package and avoid a shutdown, but another short-term continuing resolution (CR) cannot be ruled out should more time be needed to broker a deal. Speaker Pelosi also noted that the House will “soon” introduce counterpart legislation to the Senate’s United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), with the goal of going to conference with senators and producing a finalized version that can pass both chambers.

Capitol Hill Update

House lawmakers will kick off the second session of the 117^th Congress today, followed by votes on a pair of legislative items throughout the balance of the week. In a “Dear Colleague” letter to Members late Friday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced that lawmakers will take up a bipartisan bill that would allow local educational agencies participating in the Education Department’s Impact Aid Program to use the student-count or federal-property-valuation data from their fiscal year (FY) 2022 program applications for their FY 2023 applications. Proponents of the legislation — which passed the Senate by unanimous consent late last year — argue that it is needed to prevent schools from losing COVID-19 relief funds by providing flexibility to use pre-pandemic data to calculate needs.