Let's Get Into It.

WHAT’S IN IT?

• Student loans:
  
  • Eliminates Grad PLUS Loans
  • Caps lifetime federal loans at $100,000 for graduate students, $200,000 for professional students and $65,000 for Parent PLUS loans.
  • Parent PLUS loans are excluded from the loan cap totals applied to graduate/professional students.
    
  • Maintains current loan limits and preserves subsidized loans for undergraduates. (The House bill would have eliminated these subsidies and tied limits to program costs.)
    
  • A new limited repayment plan is included but cannot be applied to existing borrowers, per the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling.
• Pell Grants:
  Pell eligibility would be revoked for students receiving non-Title IV external aid equal to or exceeding their cost of attendance. The bill expands Pell access to short-term, accredited programs, but does not adopt the House’s proposed 15-credit hour full-time requirement.
  
  
• Endowment tax:
  The Senate’s version reshapes the tax on large university endowments:
  • Exempts schools with fewer than 3,000 tuition-paying students, up from the House’s 500-student threshold.
  • Introduces a tiered tax structure with rates from 1.4% to 8%, depending on endowment size. (The House plan went as high as 21%.) 
    
    
• The final reconciliation bill included $150 million to the Department of Energy for Transformational Artificial Intelligence Models, including an “American Science Cloud” (Sec. 50404)
  • The American science cloud is defined as “a system of US government, academic, and private sector programs and infrastructures utilizing cloud computing technologies to facilitate and support scientific research, data sharing, and computational analysis across various disciplines while ensuring compliance with applicable legal, regulatory, and privacy standards.”
  • The provision provides funds to the DOE to mobilize national labs to partner with industry and curate the agency’s scientific data for use in training AI models and to initiate seed efforts for self-improving artificial intelligence models for science and engineering using that data. The bill specifies microelectronics and new energy technologies as uses for the models created by this initiative.
    

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE HOUSE?

WHAT COMES NEXT?