The House Appropriations Committee completed its consideration of the FY 17 Labor HHS bill on July 14th, and froze Adult Education state grants under WIOA at the FY16 level ($581,955 million). The the House and Senate numbers are identical. The vote on the the House bill was 31-19 with the vote splitting along party lines.
As in the Subcommittee markup, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) again introduced an amendment to restore year-round Pell Grants, but the provision was also voted down on party lines, except for Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) who voted in favor.
If your’re interested, here is a link to the Committee Report. The report has nothing particularly interesting to say about adult education except to confirm the numbers we already knew. There was a dig at the delay in the WIOA regs in the section on the Department of Labor, on page 5:
WIOA Implementation.—In a March 2016 report entitled ‘‘Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act: Information on Planned Changes to State Performance Reporting and Related Challenges’’ (GAO–16–287), the Government Accountability Office (GAO) cited limited guidance and lack of regulations implementing WIOA as reasons for the slowed implementation of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act enacted in July 2014. The Committee directs the Department to finalize and implement critical WIOA regulations as soon as possible.
The House and Senate are on recess until early September.
When Congress returns it will need to complete consideration of all appropriations bills. It is likely that the Labor HHS bill will be folded into a larger package — probably a Continuing Resolution (CR) of some duration followed by an Omnibus bill. The duration of the CR is under discussion.