A two-year budget deal between the U.S. House and Senate Budget Chairs (Ryan (R-WI) and Murray (D-WA)) turns out to be not terrible for education relative to sequester cuts that could take place.
$45 billion gets split evenly between defense and non-defense discretionary (NDD) funding—the $22.5 billion in NDD replaces 87% of the $25.8 billion NDD FY13 sequester cut. The NDD level will be $492 billion. By comparison, the FY 14 sequester level is $469 billion, the current CR level is $468 billion and the FY 13 level was $473 billion.
For FY 15, it adds $18 billion, again split evenly between defense and NDD, so the NDD cap will rise slightly.
Check out
an early summary of the deal here.
It still has to pass, and then get distributed among all the NDD committees, but the bipartisan work across chambers is certainly encouraging.
Lots of coverage of this already, so check
here and
here for a few examples.