TEACHER EDUCATION DIVISION | COUNCIL FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN
Washington Update
This Week: The Senate Draws Its Line on Special Education, and Nine More Bills Move
July 31, 2026
Dear colleagues,
This week the HELP Committee gaveled its way through one of the fullest agendas of the year: ten bills and three nominations, with the two bills at the top written for our field. This is a special edition covering the whole docket; OSERS transfer, dyslexia and literacy, college students with disabilities, transparency data, and the nominee who would run the department where much of K-12 may be headed. Let’s get to it.
1. The Senate Answers on Special Education: S.5038 and S.5046
The two bills at the top of the agenda are direct responses to the administration’s effort to move special education out of the Department of Education:
S. 5038, the Special Education Administration Protection Act (Chairman Cassidy). Does one thing: bars the Department from outsourcing special education programming to HHS, the destination Secretary McMahon has told advocates she intends for OSEP. Narrow by design; it does not reach other agencies and does not touch the existing OCR arrangement with the Justice Department.
S. 5046 (Sen. Kaine, cosponsored by Republican Sens. Collins and Murkowski). Goes further: prohibits transferring four named offices to any federal agency, and closes the workaround the administration has actually been using by barring new interagency agreements, contracting, and transfer authorities designed to accomplish the same moves. The covered offices:
Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS)
Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE)
Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE)
Office of Indian Education
One caveat: agreements that were already in effect , as of February 1, 2025 are exempt.
What this means for our field: Read these two bills against the House markup and the picture sharpens. The House committee voted to write nearly every transfer into law but declined to put special education’s destination on paper. Now the Republican chairman of the Senate committee of jurisdiction has moved his own bill to keep special education administration inside the Department, and two Republicans joined a Democrat to go further. The disagreement over where IDEA lives now runs through the Republican side, not just across the aisle. That is the strongest congressional pushback on the OSEP relocation we have seen.
2. Dyslexia and the Science of Reading Move Together
Two literacy bills rode the same agenda:
S. 3010, the 21st Century Dyslexia Act (Sens. Cassidy and Hickenlooper). Would remove dyslexia from the broad Specific Learning Disabilities category under IDEA and establish it as its own distinct disability category, with the stated aim of improving identification, testing, and services.
S. 4689, the READ Act (the chairman’s broader literacy vehicle). Per the bill text: strengthens literacy outcomes, amends the Comprehensive Literacy State Development grant program, and builds federal accountability and investment in research, teacher preparation, and evidence-based instruction aligned with the science of reading.
On the Dyslexia Act, any statutory category change would ripple through eligibility determinations, child find, personnel standards, and the coursework every one of our preparation programs teaches- it also calls into question reopening IDEA. Whatever your view, this is no longer an abstract proposal; it is a bill moving through the committee of jurisdiction with the chairman’s name on it. Albeit a chairman who is on his way out the door. The READ Act’s teacher preparation provisions likewise put your programs again in the accountability conversation.
What this means for our field: Dyslexia policy is Chairman Cassidy’s signature education lane, and with his chairmanship running through January 2027, these bills are his legacy play. If either advance further, TED and our literacy and learning disabilities colleagues need to be at the table on implementation details: how identification changes, what it means for personnel preparation standards, and whether the science of reading accountability provisions account for students with disabilities.
3. Higher Education: Transparency, Documentation Rights, and State Loans
Three higher education bills moved as well:
S. 2511, the College Transparency Act (Sens. Cassidy and Warren). Would overturn the federal ban on a student-level data network and house modernized, privacy-protected outcome data at the National Center for Education Statistics, closing the gap that leaves roughly a third of students, those who receive no federal aid, invisible in today’s datasets. Broad support from the higher education associations; independent colleges continue to raise student privacy objections.
S. 3589, the RISE Act. One this community has championed across multiple Congresses: requires colleges to accept prior documentation, an IEP, a 504 plan, or an existing evaluation, as sufficient proof of disability for accommodations, sparing students and families costly re-evaluations at the college door.
S. 4097, the State-Based Education Loan Awareness Act. Would exclude state-affiliated nonprofit loan programs from certain preferred-lender requirements so institutions can more easily point students to them; consumer advocates have flagged concerns about weakening those guardrails.
What this means for our field:The RISE Act is the sleeper here for our members. Every teacher educator advising a student who battled for accommodations knows the documentation wall. If it becomes law, disability services offices, and the students we send them, get a meaningfully simpler on-ramp. The College Transparency Act matters for our research community: program-level outcome data would transform how we study the educator pipeline.
4. The Nominations: Three Advance, All Narrowly
All three nominations had been postponed the prior week amid Republican absences and unresolved questions about Mr. Kaufman, whom Chairman Cassidy supported only after securing what he described as commitments that Kaufman would not be involved in vaccine policy. Yesterday they moved:
Keith Sonderling, Secretary of Labor: advanced 12-11. Senator Sanders opposed him on workers’ rights grounds. Floor confirmation is likely.
Erica Schwartz, CDC Director: advanced 12-10.
Sean Kaufman, HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response: advanced 12-11.
Sonderling matters most for our purposes. Labor is the administration’s preferred destination for major K-12 and workforce programs, and this is the same nominee who told Senator Kaine at his confirmation hearing that he did not know the core pillars of IDEA, describing them as a Department of Education matter.
What this means for our field: If the transfer architecture survives, the Labor Secretary becomes a de facto education official with authority touching teacher preparation dollars and the programs our students rely on. His unfamiliarity with IDEA is not a gotcha; it is the practical argument against scattering education programs across agencies whose leaders have other jobs. Use it, respectfully, in your advocacy.
5. The Rest of the Docket
Rounding out the agenda, per the official bill titles:
S. 3333, the Emergency Savings Enhancement Act: expands workplace emergency savings tools.
S. 4965, the Railroad Retirement Board Stability Act: shores up the agency that administers railroad workers’ benefits.
S. 3097, the Health Information Privacy Reform Act: addresses health data privacy.
None carries direct special education impact, but their presence on a bipartisan agenda is its own signal: this committee is still legislating across party lines even in a heated season.
6. What Happens Next, and the Honest Odds
Committee passage is the easy part so to speak, even though very few bills make it to committee let alone out of committee (less than 3 percent and less than 1 percent of those become law). Each of these bills needs sixty votes on the Senate floor, and the special education pair has no House companion moving; a veto waits at the end of the standalone path. But that was never the near-term play. Committee action positions this language to ride the appropriations bills Congress must write this fall, and it puts the Department on notice that the committee of jurisdiction, on a bipartisan basis, is watching its next interagency agreement.
Thank you, as always, for the work you do.
With appreciation and resolve,
Kait Brennan, PhD
Policy Advisor, Teacher Education Division, Council for Exceptional Children
Sources: Senate HELP Committee executive session agenda and bill texts (help.senate.gov); Congress.gov bill records for S. 5038, S. 5046, S. 2511, S. 3010, S. 3589, S. 4097, S. 4689, S. 3333, S. 4965, and S. 3097; committee and member press releases; Axios, The Hill, and AP reporting on the July 30 nomination votes; K-12 Dive reporting on the transfer prohibition bills.
Disclaimer: The views, opinions and information expressed in this statement by TED may not reflect the official policies or positions of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC).
