Rep. Tim Walberg, a Republican from Michigan, has been tapped to chair the Home Committee on Training and the Workforce.
“We’ve vital work forward of us, from enshrining protections for folks to persevering with to guard Jewish college students on school campuses to rights offering extra alternative and suppleness to American employees,” Walberg mentioned in an announcement Thursday. “Freedom, alternative, and equity will information our work as we ship outcomes for America.”
His assertion means that at the very least certainly one of his larger schooling priorities will mirror that of the committee’s outgoing chief, Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina. For over a 12 months, Foxx and different committee Republicans have investigated faculties’ response to campus unrest following the October 2023 outbreak of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Most just lately, they launched a scathing 325-page report that accused 11 high-profile faculties of failing to guard Jewish college students from discrimination and known as for a evaluate of their federal funding.
Foxx praised Walberg’s choice in an announcement Thursday.
“He’s been a collaborative, efficient, and hardworking member of the Committee for 16 years, and I’m excited to see him step into this management position,” Foxx mentioned. “I’ve little doubt that he’ll hit the bottom operating and can work tirelessly to make sure college students have the chance to study and employees have the power to succeed.”
Walberg’s current press interviews present clues about his different larger schooling priorities. In October, he advised Politico that he would use the highest management place to concentrate on school affordability, enhance apprenticeships and internships, and make Pell Grants accessible for short-term workforce coaching applications.
The ultimate initiative exhibits rising bipartisan momentum.
A bunch of bipartisan lawmakers, together with Foxx and Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and rating member on the schooling committee, launched a invoice earlier this month that may make Pell Grant applications accessible for workforce coaching in 2025 and initially fund them with $40 million.
In an interview earlier this month with Roll Name, Walberg equally mentioned he would concentrate on offering alternate options to varsity.
“We’ve wrung our fingers for too lengthy about boys not happening to varsity,’’ Walberg advised the publication. “There are most likely a number of causes for that, however we additionally know that there are many boys — and women — who, given the chance to see what’s on the market, could make [other] decisions.”
The Home Republican Steering Committee voted to choose Walberg because the Home’s schooling chair over Utah Republican Rep. Burgess Owens after each lawmakers offered earlier than its members, Politico reported.
Owens at the moment chairs the panel’s subcommittee on larger schooling and workforce improvement. He’s a fierce critic of variety, fairness and inclusion initiatives on school campuses. Forward of a listening to earlier this 12 months on the topic, Owens mentioned in an announcement that, “We can not let DEI sabotage our nation’s basic values of arduous work and meritocracy.”
He additionally launched laws in Could 2023 that would prohibit accreditors from requiring faculties to stick to DEI requirements.
Walberg’s choice because the Home panel’s prime chief comes two years after he misplaced out on the position to Foxx, who has chaired the committee twice and served because the Republicans’ rating member between 2019 and 2022. On the time, the Steering Committee granted her a waiver to exceed the place’s time period limits.
The highest schooling management place within the Senate — chair of the Well being, Training, Labor and Pensions Committee — will go to Invoice Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana. Cassidy was named the Senate panel’s chair in November.
Cassidy has been a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s scholar mortgage forgiveness efforts, together with by spearheading a decision to cease President Joe Biden’s unique debt aid plan. That plan, which might have supplied as much as $20,000 in mortgage forgiveness per borrower, was in the end struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court docket.
