WASHINGTON—The budget Republicans want to ram through, in addition to slashing Medicaid and Medicare, eviscerates labor and education so severely that pressure is growing on Democrats to withhold votes at the end of this month to keep the government running and allow a shutdown rather than foist immeasurable harm on the American people. Republicans cannot get their “continuing resolution,” saving their killer budget, through Congress three weeks from now unless Democrats give them the votes they need for passage.
The GOP’s cuts are so large and its social issue provisions are so extreme that some Democrats warn they will not give the ruling Republicans—especially in the Senate—the votes they need to avert a looming government shutdown at midnight on September 30.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., “has come around to the viewpoint of telling Republicans that partisan CRs are dead on arrival,” one Democratic senator, who requested anonymity to comment on internal strategy, told The Hill.
CRs are “continuing resolutions,” temporary money bills to keep the government going until lawmakers can pass money bills. Right now, the entire government is running on a CR approved in March—with key Senate Democratic votes, thanks to a Schumer surrender of leverage at that time.
As if taking healthcare away from millions was not bad enough the GOP budget ends aid to independent unionists struggling abroad to raise living standards, cuts job training for adults and shutters Job Corp centers for children. It tops that off with a $50 million cut to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and a 99-person cut in the already woefully understaffed National Labor Relations Board.
A freeze on Pell Grant maximums is also in store, along with removal of all funding to train English as a second language teachers. The devastation visited upon the Centers for Disease Control is ramped up with further cuts in money and personnel for the agency
Also cut entirely is funding for Planned Parenthood and shuttered entirely is the Labor Department office that enforces civil rights laws on federal contractors.
Eliminated are any “social issue” provisions opposed by MAGAites, misogynists, sexists and white nationalists and added are provisions they back.
No wonder the House’s ruling Republicans’ draft money bill for the fiscal year starting October 1 for the departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services upsets both House Appropriations Committee Democrats and the nation’s education-oriented unions.
Two of the unions—the 3-million-member National Education Association, the nation’s largest, and the smaller School Administrators (AFSA)—vow to fight back in different ways. They’ll have a lot to fight for, and against.
The panel’s Labor-Education-HHS subcommittee work session on September 2 produced a partisan blueprint by the GOP. It’s fueled by the demands of Republican President Donald Trump, panel chair Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., admitted.
He gleefully cited a $4.7 billion cut in Title I money for schools with majorities of kids from low-income—read “Black and brown”—households, claiming those schools are failing anyway. That means 72,000 fewer teachers nationwide, retorted the panel’s top Democrat, veteran Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.
“The actions of this malicious and vindictive administration are hurting the middle class, the working class, and the vulnerable across every single one of our districts and taking us back decades…This bill says we cannot afford to put a teacher in their child’s classroom,” DeLauro exclaimed. It’s “on the way to privatizing public education.”
Crafted fightback plans
The National Education Association (NEA) and the School Administrators (AFSA) crafted their fightback plans at their recent conventions.
Nearly 7,000 educators will return home ready to advocate for their students and colleagues—at the bargaining table, in school board meetings, at state legislatures, and at the ballot box,” the NEA’s Representative Assembly, its convention, decided.
NEA devoted an entire day to training delegates in “effective advocacy, fighting vouchers and privatization, promoting inclusive and just schools, protecting immigrant students, and building power for the common good.”
“We must use our power to take action that leads, action that liberates, action that lasts,” NEA President Becky Pringle, a Philadelphia science teacher, told delegates, meeting in Portland, Ore. “We are going to Educate. Communicate. Organize. Mobilize. Litigate. Legislate. Elect.”
NEA delegates committed the union to campaigning to reverse the then-looming cuts, to “advancing equity and inclusion for every student and educator, regardless of ZIP code, race, or identity,” and to “renewing the promise of democracy.”
The NEA members took their lessons back home to train their colleagues in advocacy from the city school board and county council all the way to Congress—backed by the power of votes from three million members nationwide.
“We cannot simply fight against,” added Pringle (her emphasis). “We must also fight forward: For our vision of a public school system where every student—every one—attends a school that is safe, welcoming, and plentiful in resources, a school where every student is celebrated for who they know themselves to be, a school steeped in excellence and care, where education justice is recognized as a birthright, where educators—you—are valued as the professionals you are.”
At its August 27 convention, AFSA, which represents 22,000 principals, counselors, and other school administrators, opted for an inside game.
AFSA delegates pledged to defend and restore a complete federal Department of Education and its programs and grants. Trump Education Secretary Linda McMahon—a GOP big giver—fired half of its workers at his orders. Trump wants to shut down the department. The Education Department is a longtime bugaboo of white nationalists and the radical right. Trump calls it a nest of “communists.”
“The Department of Education must not be dismantled, defunded, or diminished,” delegates decided unanimously. ”Its programs are lifelines—for students with disabilities, low-income families, and the teachers and school leaders who rely on professional development to meet the evolving needs of their schools.
“Weakening the department would have devastating consequences for schools, especially in under-resourced communities,” AFSA delegates said. They “reaffirmed AFSA’s role in standing up for public education at the national level and ensuring opportunity for all students remains central to educational policy.”
Opportunity for all includes funding English as a Second Language training, Rep. DeLauro said. The money bill kills that completely. Five million kids will lose the opportunity to learn the language that would get them into the economy in the future.
Not just education in danger
But it’s not just education that’s in danger from the money bill, which the House panel approved. Other provisions included:’
- Cutting funding for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration by $50 million, rolling back the number of inspections next year. The Senate subcommittee version of the money bill keeps OSHA at its current $632 million.
- Cutting money for the National Labor Relations Board by $88 million. It’s now at $299 million. The House panel expects buyouts and early retirements will cut the NLRB staff–which unions and its in-house union have argued for years is too small—by 99 people and $17.5 million.
- “Provisions protecting the rights of independent contractors and ending forced wage rates for agricultural workers.” Republican panel chair Aderholt was not specific about the farm workers, but the Biden administration made moves to raise their wages.
And the GOP favors more so-called “independent contractors” who can’t unionize, can’t get workers’ comp or jobless benefits and must pay both the workers’ share and the bosses’ share of Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes.
- No money for Planned Parenthood, even for non-abortion services. That continues the GOP’s decades-long crusade against reproductive choice.
- Writing Trump’s ban on federal “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs into federal law. It’s now just an executive order.
- Renaming Workforce Pell Grants—money for adult education–as Trump Grants.
- Eliminating gun violence prevention, teen pregnancy prevention, and tobacco use prevention funds. Smoking—and lung cancer from it— is still a leading cause of death. And shooting deaths, including mass shootings, are the top cause of death of teens.
- Cutting the National Institutes of Health medical research money by $500 million.
- A ban on “federal funding going toward enforcing gender identity politics or social, hormonal, and surgical interventions to change a child’s sex,” catering to another “social issue” the radical right and its misogynists trumpet.
- More money for “education vouchers,” code words for taxpayer-paid vouchers for parents of private school kids. Private schools can and do discriminate.
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