First, President Trump proposed a multibillion-dollar slash to the federal budget for higher ed. Then, Senate appropriators rejected his plan, keeping funding for many programs intact. And now House Republicans have landed somewhere in the middle, choosing to advance some of the president’s political priorities while blocking others.

Released Tuesday, the House’s spending plan would cut the Department of Education’s budget by 15 percent. That gives the agency $67 billion, down from $79 billion in fiscal year 2025. Funding for key student aid programs like the Pell Grant and the TRIO college-access initiative would remain stable, but others could face steep cuts or be zeroed out entirely.

The bill also includes a $456 million cut to the National Institutes of Health, a ban on enforcing certain Biden-era regulations and an attempt to rename the new workforce Pell Grant as the Trump Grant.

Policy experts largely say this bill represents exactly what they expected. The few surprises, they added, were positive ones.

“At a high level, the House seems to be attempting to align with Trump a little bit more closely than the Senate side,” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education. “But if anything was surprising, it was the pleasant surprise that [cuts to] some areas like Work-Study weren’t as significant as the ones Trump proposed.” (Trump’s proposal would have slashed $980 million from Federal Work-Study, and the House plan would only cut about $451 million, congressional Democrats say.)

House Republicans say cuts are necessary to ensure “taxpayer dollars are being spent responsibly.”

“I look forward to the continued progress this Committee can make in restoring trust with the American people as we responsibly allocate taxpayer dollars,” Rep. Robert Aderholt, an Alabama Republican and chair of the House appropriations subcommittee, said in a news release. “This bill lays a strong foundation for transparency and fiscal accountability.”

But Congress still has a long way to go before the budget takes effect. Lawmakers in each chamber will have to make some compromises to reach an agreement or pass a temporary resolution by Oct. 1; if they don’t, the government will shut down for the fifth time over the last 10 years.

And this time around, in addition to the traditional party-line disputes over spending, the president’s actions could keep lawmakers from passing the bill.

During his first seven months in office, President Trump has cut millions in grant funding and held back funds appropriated by Congress—moves that Democrats and some Republicans have said are illegal. House Democrats and senators from both sides of the aisle worry that unless the final bill includes explicit language prohibiting future rescissions, Trump could continue impounding taxpayer dollars for as long as he sees fit.

“We’ve really hit some uncharted territory,” one higher ed consultant said, speaking anonymously. “I just can’t imagine there being a way in which the Democrats could essentially get absolute confirmation and assurance from Republicans that they won’t go back into any rescission.”

How Do the Bills Compare?

Like the Senate, House Republicans opted to protect historically bipartisan programs like the Pell Grant and TRIO, which support first-generation and low-income students across the country.

If passed, the bill would keep the maximum Pell award at $7,395 per student per year; the president had proposed lowering it to $5,710. And instead of being eliminated, TRIO would maintain its budget of $1.6 billion.

Still, in many ways, House Republicans on the appropriations committee stuck with Trump. Certain grants focused on bolstering teacher preparation, aiding extremely low-income learners, providing childcare to student parents and promoting foreign language instruction would be zeroed out entirely. And other offices like the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights could lose millions.

Multiple higher ed advocates said their greatest concern was the elimination of all funding for the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant. A need-based award for undergraduate students with the most dire financial need, this decades-long program was created to fill any remaining cost-of-living gaps after the Pell Grant. Now, many marginalized students would be left to fend for themselves.

“The middle class, the working class and vulnerable Americans are facing a cost-of-living crisis. They need affordable health care, access to reproductive health and good public schools,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat and the subcommittee’s ranking member, said in a news release. “But with the 2026 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies funding bill, Republicans are abandoning them.”

Craig Lindwarm, senior vice president for governmental affairs at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, applauded House appropriators for preserving Pell and key NIH research funds, but he urged them to think twice before cutting FSEOG.

“As lawmakers continue their work on appropriations, we urge Congress to secure key investments in a skilled workforce and world-leading biomedical research that will support cures for debilitating and deadly diseases,” Lindwarm said.

What’s Next?

Much of how the next month will play out remains uncertain, but most policy analysts don’t think Congress will be able to pass a full budget bill by the Sept. 30 deadline.

Instead, many expect that lawmakers will pass a temporary stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution, to buy more time and keep the government open. After that, they say, talks over the budget will likely come down to whether Democrats can trust the president to follow Congress’s orders.

“Nobody really knows how this will play out, but at the end of the day, I think the question becomes, what type of commitment—if any—can the Dems get if they broker a deal that the administration won’t turn around and do a rescission,” the higher ed consultant explained.

And it’s not just Democrats that are concerned. Some Republicans, like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, have also sounded the alarm. When Trump said Friday that he would pull back $4.9 billion, this time with or without congressional approval, Collins said it was an “attempt to undermine the law.”

“Article I of the Constitution makes clear that Congress has the responsibility for the power of the purse. Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” she said in a news release.

But a government shutdown, which is likely unless the bill explicitly bans future rescissions, could also be problematic, the consultant said.

“If you have a shutdown, it’s the president who’s making determinations on what is emergency spending and what has to continue, and that could play into his favor on wanting to significantly shrink the size of government,” they added. “You’re kind of giving the president all the cards.”

Either way, higher education experts agree the next few months will likely be a bumpy road.

“We really don’t know how this is going to end up,” Guillory of ACE said. “So it is only our hope that the numbers will align more with the Senate version.”