Via Shutterstock
We’ve heard this story before: The federal government is scheduled to run out of money next Friday, unless Congress and the White House can agree to a continuing budget resolution to carry through the end of the current fiscal year.
Only in this current performance of a tired old show, the impacts of a budget impasse are already being felt by many of D.C.’s college students who depend on a federal grant program to help cover the cost of tuition. The Washington Post reports that recipients of the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant—which offers up to $10,000 a year for an out-of-state public university or $2,500 for tuition at a D.C.-area college or historically black college or university—stopped receiving payments last month. The program is designed to help out about 6,000 high school graduates every year, but right now, because of the way Congress authorizes funding of government programs, it isn’t helping anyone:
Like all federal programs, the $35 million DC TAG program has been funded since Oct. 1 through a continuing resolution—a stopgap budget measure that Congress agreed to when it couldn’t reach a longer-term compromise.
City officials who administer DC TAG said they had to halt payments to students on Feb. 28, when the program exceeded expenditures allowed under the conditions of that continuing resolution.
The Post reports that if Congress passes a new continuing resolution to run through the end of fiscal 2013 on September 30, tuition grants could resume as soon as March 28. But first the House and the Senate—which have each passed their own continuing resolutions, need to reconcile their differences, which is never breezy.
And if suspending tuition assistance payments because the stopgap financing has run out isn’t bad enough for the D.C. TAG program, it is subject to getting slashed in the next fiscal year because of the federal budget sequestration now in effect. The program could lose as much as $5 million of its scheduled $30 million budget for next year, according to figures provided by the White House Office of Management and Budget.
