Democrats Vie to Take Back House Education Committee

Democrats have long been up in arms about President Trump’s attempt to dismantle the Education Department, and now, as voters head to the polls, legislators are hopeful that they’ll be able to turn their months of messaging into action.

Since the earliest days of Trump’s second term, Democrats have consistently signaled their frustration with Education Secretary Linda McMahon and her department. They’ve sent letters demanding she “abandon” her “illegal” plans to delegate mandated responsibilities to other agencies, introduced legislation to try to block her proposed regulations and added extra language to appropriations documents in hopes of eliminating the spending loopholes she used to redirect taxpayer funds. One House member pushed for McMahon’s impeachment.

Now, if voters hand Democrats control of at least one chamber of Congress, Trump and his Education Department should only expect that scrutiny to ramp up more. But Democrats don’t just want to hold the administration to account. In fact, they say, their top priority is to make college more affordable.

Woven throughout the Democrats’ warnings about executive overreach and the withholding of federal funds have also been calls to address college costs by raising the maximum Pell award and repealing Republicans’ loan limits, among other proposals. But with the potential that Republicans could maintain a majority in the Senate and Trump still occupying the White House, getting GOP backing for increased grants and unlimited loans will be an uphill battle. Still, it’s one Democrats appear ready to fight.

“We need to make sure that the focus is going to be on access, and that means Pell Grants, student loans and interest on student loans,” said Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, the current ranking member on the Education and Workforce Committee. “There’s a lot that we can work on, and my experience is we can get it done.”

When Democrats won control of the House in 2018, during the first Trump administration, Scott served as chair of the education committee, and he’s looking to reprise that role. But this time two other incumbent representatives are vying to take the lead: Rep. Jahana Hayes from Connecticut and Suzanne Bonamici from Oregon.

Hayes, who was the first to challenge Scott for the chair in September, declined to schedule an interview with Inside Higher Ed ahead of Election Day. But Bonamici, who called for McMahon’s impeachment, told Inside Higher Ed she shares many of the same priorities as Scott.

Combined, the two competing representatives laid out a clear picture of what to expect should Democrats retake control of the committee for the first time in four years.

Access Comes First

Democrats have beaten the affordability drum throughout the midterm campaigns as current and aspiring lawmakers aim to tap into voters’ frustrations over the rising cost of gas and groceries.

Talks about college costs are no different. A recent survey conducted by Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit focused on the intersection of education and the workforce, found that 66 percent of Americans who responded would be more likely to support a candidate who focused on making education and training more affordable.

Both Scott and Bonamici said one of their top agenda items is to double the maximum annual Pell Grant award from $7,395 to nearly $15,000. (Both are co-sponsors of legislation introduced in June that would do just that.)

“The Pell Grant used to cover about 80 percent of the cost of going to a state college … Now you can work 40 hours a week with a full Pell Grant and still require crushing loans,” Scott said. The idea is something student advocacy groups have been lobbying for years.

Bonamici, who worked for several years before pursuing her associate and eventually law degrees at Oregon colleges, said she’d also like to see other aid programs, like Federal Work-Study and Child Care Access Means Parents in School expanded.

“I think many of my colleagues have a vision of a college student as a 19-year-old in a dorm with a meal plan, and that’s just not the reality of many students today. When I have conversations with college students, many of them are struggling with food insecurity, housing insecurity. So, if we don’t address those issues, we’re going to be closing the door of opportunity,” she said.

But all those support services come at a cost. The Pell Grant is already facing a projected $17 billion funding shortfall for fiscal year 2027, and that’s just to continue doling out the current maximum award. So doubling the grant and expanding other programs would require significant bipartisan backing to pull enough funding from another area of the budget.

While Trump’s latest budget proposal provided a one-time $10.5 billion infusion to keep award levels steady, he has previously recommended slashing the maximum grant and zeroing out other programs.

“There are many options to provide funding for access to affordable higher education, including clawing back funding from Trump’s vanity projects and the bloated budgets for ICE and the so-called Department of War,” Bonamici said.

Both lawmakers also say they’d like to improve college access by repealing the federal loan limits set by Republicans in their signature piece of legislation, 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The new law limits some graduate students to $20,500 a year and others to $50,000. It also limits how much parents of an undergrad can borrow to $20,000 per year, per student. Loans for both groups were previously uncapped.

Some lawmakers have already sought to increase the number of graduate students who can borrow the higher amount. Meanwhile, some outside policy experts say the caps should remain, though the amounts should be adjusted to higher levels for careers that show stronger returns on investment.

But Scott and Bonamici believe the simplest approach is to repeal the limits entirely as well as to lower the interest rate for borrowers, though that would require Trump’s approval, which appears unlikely.

“If you add up the money, most low-income students will not be able to complete those courses [like medical school, nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant programs] using the federal student loan program as they can now. So, reversing that to keep those opportunities open will be one of the first things I do,” Scott said.

Defending the Department

Although any significant changes will require support from Trump, Democrats don’t need Republicans’ help to seek answers about the president’s attempts to dismantle the Education Department.

Bonamici said lawmakers will have to first assess the extent and scope of damage that’s been done before working to reverse it.

They expect to subpoena McMahon and other cabinet members for public hearings. Since Trump took office, nearly all of the Education Department’s key programs and responsibilities have been distributed across a number of other agencies including Labor, Treasury, Health and Interior.

“There’s been no oversight to ascertain whether or not the new agencies are better able to handle the work than the Department of Education,” Scott said. “Having student loans in Treasury suggests that the job is just to issue the loan and collect the money. It ignores the fact that a lot of the work in the student loan program is about determining which programs and colleges qualify for [federal] funding.”

Scott also said he’d like to hear from career staff who are not politically appointed about the transition and whether they feel it was effective.

A similar tactic can be expected when it comes to questioning the Trump administration’s efforts to cut grants and contracts, as well as the millions in congressionally appropriated dollars that have gone unspent. Bonamici also said she hopes to address the various programs that have been shut down at ED and across the nation’s colleges after the president declared some diversity, equity and inclusion programs illegal.

But unlike the Republicans who led the House during this last Congress and grilled university presidents who they believed were violating students’ civil rights and mismanaging claims of antisemitism, Scott and Bonamici said they don’t intend to turn up the heat on institutional leaders who struck deals with the administration or shut down DEI programs to appease Trump.

“So much of what Republicans did was performative. I’m more concerned with how we get the best policies,” Bonamici said.

Scott added that the “spectacle” of questioning colleges isn’t “at all productive.”

“If we’re gonna do something about discrimination on campuses, the first thing that we ought to do is to find out what the Office [for] Civil Rights is doing,” he said, adding that so far it hasn’t been much.

Who Is Best Equipped

So which lawmaker is best equipped to lead the charge for Democrats? Scott and Bonamici said it comes down to perspective.

Scott pointed to his years of tenure; he’s been either the ranking member or chair since 2015. Specifically, he highlighted his leadership through the COVID pandemic and ability to win funding for colleges that “would have gone broke if we hadn’t stepped up.”

What sets Scott apart, he said, is “experience and success.”

Meanwhile, Bonamici believes it is her new vision that makes her well suited for the role.

“I have a lot of respect for my colleagues who are on the committee and running for the chair position, but I know we need to do more to meet the moment,” she said. “I have been on the committee for 14 years. I’ve served on every subcommittee. But I have a vision of how we can work together to improve education, protect labor rights and bring a fresh, collaborative approach to this committee.”