Washington — July 3, 2025 — Today, after a 51-50 Senate vote earlier this week and a 218-214 House vote this afternoon, Congress approved the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that includes many of President Trump’s top priorities from the campaign trail. We expect the President to sign the bill into law imminently. While the focus of the bill is on many areas beyond higher education and is intended to primarily address taxes and programs that have mandatory spending, the new law does affect our colleges and students.
Specifically, the bill creates the Workforce Pell program. A priority for our institutions for over a decade, Workforce Pell allows eligible students to use the Pell grant when enrolling in workforce focused programs that are between 8 and 15 weeks of length (150 to 600 clock hours). Additionally, the bill provides additional funding for the Pell Grant program to resolve a projected shortfall, makes technical fixes to the FAFSA form to better target need-based aid, excludes family farms, small businesses, and fisheries from being counted as assets for financial aid purposes, ultimately rejects risk-sharing proposals circulated by lawmakers, and makes changes to the student loan program that will impact how students pay for college.
In response to the passage, ACCT President and CEO Jee Hang Lee said:
The passage into law of the Workforce Pell Program after long-sought advocacy by our colleges will allow students looking to quickly jumpstart or retool their professions to access the financial aid they need to do so. We thank the leaders of the education committees for ensuring this important priority remained a part of the final package.
Several other areas affect higher education as well. We will keep our members up to date about how the changes in student loans and new accountability programs may affect their work.
Additionally, we will monitor how changes to SNAP and Medicaid may impact the ability of our students who rely on these public supports to progress in their studies.
For more information on how else the bill impacts higher education, please check out ACCT’s Fact Sheets page for a summary of the education provisions. To stay informed on this and other federal developments, check out ACCT’s Advocacy page and sign up for our Latest Action in Washington updates at ACCT Now.