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Washington Update

Special Edition: What the Election Means for Our Field, and What to Know Before Denver

November 7, 2026

Friends and colleagues,

The votes were still being counted when I started writing this, and some of them still are. But the shape of the result is clear enough to say what it means. Democrats will control both the House and the Senate when the 120th Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027. The Associated Press called the Senate late Tuesday night and the House early Wednesday morning.

Two cautions before we go further. First, the Congress that is in session right now is the one that was elected in 2024, and it stays in place for the next two months. Everything with a December date on it, including the December 11 funding deadline, gets decided by the current majorities, not the new ones. Second, a change in who holds the gavel changes what gets a hearing and what gets written into a bill; it does not by itself change what the Department does on Monday morning. Both of those cautions matter for how we spend the next eight weeks, shall we:

1. The Result, as It Stands

Democrats needed a net gain of four Senate seats and three House seats. By Wednesday morning they had flipped seven Senate seats, Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Maine and South Carolina, and had cleared the 218 needed in the House with dozens of races still uncalled. Two more Senate seats, Mississippi and Alaska, were still being counted on Friday with the Democratic candidates narrowly ahead and no call from the AP. The Associated Press called the Senate for Democrats at about 11:40 PM Eastern on Tuesday and the House early Wednesday. Seat totals will keep moving for days, and I am not going to put a final number in writing until the AP does.

One race worth watching from our side of the table is North Carolina's Fifth District, where Virginia Foxx, the former chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee and the architect of much of the last two years' education agenda, was trailing her Democratic challenger, Chuck Hubbard, by fewer than 100 votes in the unofficial count, and the race was still uncalled on Friday. North Carolina allows a recount when the margin is within one percent of the votes cast, so a recount is likely once the counties finish their canvass. Whatever the outcome, Representative Foxx no longer chairs the education committee, and her influence on the next Congress's agenda will be from the minority either way.

2. Who Will Hold the Education Gavels

In the Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont is in line to chair the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for the second time, the panel that writes IDEA, the Higher Education Act and anything that touches teacher preparation. He last held the gavel in 2023 and 2024. Politico reported last week that his stated education priorities are tuition-free public college and teacher pay, and that much of the committee's recent work on the Department's dismantling has come from Tim Kaine of Virginia, who negotiated a commitment from outgoing Chair Bill Cassidy to vote on legislation blocking the transfer of key programs to other agencies. Cassidy leaves the Senate at the end of the year. The next Republican leader on HELP is not settled: Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are the senior names, and Politico reported Thursday that Murkowski is now in line for the top Republican seat on Appropriations after Susan Collins lost her Maine seat, which leaves HELP for the Republican conference to sort out.

In the House, three members are competing to lead Democrats on the Education and Workforce Committee, which Democrats called Education and Labor the last time they held the majority: Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat since 2015; Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, the ranking member on the K-12 subcommittee and the sponsor of the NEED Act; and Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, the 2016 National Teacher of the Year. All three are in the race for the gavel in the next Congress. Bonamici sent House offices a memo on Wednesday laying out her first 100 days, including calling Secretary McMahon and Labor Secretary Sonderling to testify, and Scott wrote McMahon the same day demanding written assurance by November 18 that Department records are being preserved under the Federal Records Act. Hayes is the member who led the House letter this spring asking appropriators for $300 million for IDEA Part D Personnel Preparation, and she is an original cosponsor of the DIVERSIFY Act that TED endorsed. Bonamici's NEED Act is the special education workforce bill we have tracked all year. Whoever wins, the committee's leadership will be someone who has already put a name to our issues.

On appropriations, the chairs of the Labor-HHS-Education subcommittees will change in both chambers in January. The members who have been the loudest on frontloading and on the Department's grant practices this fall, Patty Murray and Tammy Baldwin in the Senate and Rosa DeLauro in the House, are the senior Democrats on those panels. Politico reported Thursday that Murray is expected to chair the full Senate Appropriations Committee, and DeLauro has written her colleagues making her case for the House gavel. On the Republican side, Senate Appropriations loses Collins, its lead negotiator, along with at least three other members. Subcommittee chairs come later, and I will not name them until the caucuses do.

3. The Lame Duck Is Still Theirs (and the most dangerous animal in DC), and the Clock Is Short

The continuing resolution signed September 2 (Public Law 119-103) funds the Department at fiscal 2026 levels through December 11. The Senate had not marked up a Labor-HHS-Education bill before the election. The House bill, H.R. 9260, reported in June at $189.3 billion, rejected the President's proposal to consolidate IDEA Part D National Activities into Part B State Grants and funded the Part D lines. The request and the committee mark are different things; the House committee's version is the one that keeps personnel preparation as its own line.

Congress is scheduled to be in session for fewer than 25 days between now and December 11, and leadership has hinted that number could grow. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, who chairs the Senate Labor-HHS-Education panel through the end of the year, said in October she would rather pass full-year bills than another continuing resolution. Senator Chuck Schumer said in October that the lame duck would be quite different if Democrats won the Senate. Both of those statements are now live. Since Tuesday the read from the Hill press has shifted toward a stopgap: Politico's appropriations team wrote Wednesday that final bills by year's end are increasingly unlikely given the size of the Democratic gains, and on Friday that even a continuing resolution could struggle to get Senate consent, with talks possibly running to the holidays. Schumer said Thursday he is working with Murray to get something done on funding before the deadline. One new complication is that the top Democratic appropriators have not ruled out using the year-end bill to block money for the Iran conflict, which could turn a funding bill into a shutdown fight. The realistic outcomes are a full-year omnibus negotiated between the outgoing majority and the incoming one, or a continuing resolution that carries fiscal 2027 into the new Congress, where Democrats would finish it. Either way, the Part D lines and the IES and NCSER levels in the final bill are decided in the next five weeks or handed to the new majority.

Three other items ride on the same calendar. The September 25 pocket rescission package is in litigation in three courts, Senator Collins, who lost her seat on Tuesday, said in late September that appropriators are already looking at language on pocket rescissions for the fiscal 2027 bills, after Senator Murray could not get consent for a bill to prohibit them before the Senate adjourned. The Murray and Baldwin letter of October 13 put numbers on the Department's frontloading of multi-year awards: 12 new Teacher Quality Partnership awards with $59 million set aside for future years, 16 new SEED awards, and more than $14 million set aside under the Hawkins Centers of Excellence; that letter is silent on IDEA Part D, and whether the Department frontloaded the 84.325 competitions remains unconfirmed. And the EDGAR proposed rule, which Ranking Member Scott asked the Department to withdraw in its entirety, has no final rule and no stated timeline; nothing new had posted in the Federal Register as of November 7.

4. The Department Between Now and January

Nothing in Tuesday's result changes the Department's authority this week. The interagency agreements that moved programs to other federal agencies are executive actions; the administration can keep operating under them, and the new Congress's tools to reverse them are appropriations riders, oversight and legislation that would need 60 Senate votes and would face a veto. Senator Chris Van Hollen told Politico in September that the immediate lever is the appropriations process: language that bars funds from being used to further dismantle the Department. Jon Fansmith of the American Council on Education made the same point on Wednesday and added that a majority in both chambers gives Democrats a stronger hand to get that language into a package that some Republicans would vote for rather than cross the administration openly. The Heritage Foundation wrote to Thune, Johnson, Cassidy, Walberg and McMahon this week urging the lame duck Congress to codify the interagency agreements; Collins and several other Republicans have sided with Democrats against the special education agreement, and Fansmith told Politico on Friday not to expect much movement on education policy in the days left.

Expect hearings. Two things happened this week that bear on them. Scott's November 4 letter to McMahon and nine other agency heads put the Federal Records Act on the table, with a November 18 deadline for written assurance. And on Thursday Harmeet Dhillon resigned as head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, the office that took on civil rights enforcement duties under its interagency agreement with the Department; what her departure means for that work is not yet clear. Democratic members have said for a year that they want the Secretary and the officials who signed the interagency agreements in front of them, with a particular focus on civil rights enforcement and on where special education administration actually sits today.

5. Research and the December 11 Deadlines

Two dates fall on the same day as the funding deadline. IES's fiscal 2027 competitions for Transformative Research in Special Education (84.324T) and From Seedlings to Scale (84.305J) close December 11, with letters of intent having been due October 29. These are the first new IES competitions announced after a year with no new fiscal 2026 awards. The election does not move those deadlines, and nothing a new majority does in January can resurrect an application that was not filed.

6. Before You Go to Denver

Here is what to know walking into the TED conference next week. The Congress we are talking about in every session is the one that still exists until January 3; the one that was elected Tuesday takes office after we get home. The December 11 deadline, the pocket rescission litigation, frontloading and the EDGAR rule are all live and all decided by the current majorities. Commissioner Becky Hines of the Administration for Community Living joins us on Wednesday, November 11, and that conversation is about how the IDEA work her agency now shares actually operates, not about the election. My Washington Update that afternoon will carry whatever has changed since this note. Thursday morning's Policy Priorities session is where we set the January asks, and the people we will be asking are now, in several cases, members who already signed our letters. Come with one number from your own program: candidates enrolled, candidates placed, or a vacancy figure from a partner district. Those numbers are what turn a sympathetic chair into a line in a bill.

7. State Houses and State Chiefs

The federal story got the headlines, but for a field whose licensure rules, Part B state plans and personnel development grants run through state agencies, the state results matter at least as much. Democrats flipped the governor's offices in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas and held Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; Democrats will hold a majority of governorships for the first time since 2010, with Kansas still being counted at this writing. Wisconsin's legislature flipped both chambers, giving Democrats a trifecta there for the first time in 16 years. In Pennsylvania, Governor Shapiro won a second term by more than 20 points (60 to 39), Democrats expanded their state House majority, and the AP called the state Senate for Democrats on Wednesday morning, 26 to 24, after four seats flipped in Bucks, Lehigh, Montgomery and Monroe counties; it is the first Democratic Senate majority since 1993 and the first full Democratic trifecta in Harrisburg in more than three decades.

Two elected state chiefs changed hands or are about to. In Georgia, Lydia Powell, a Democrat and former educator, defeated three-term Superintendent Richard Woods, 55 to 45. In California, Sonja Shaw conceded Wednesday night and San Diego school board member Richard Barrera will be the next superintendent, in a role a new state law narrows in January as an appointed education commissioner takes over the department. South Carolina re-elected Ellen Weaver. Arizona was called Thursday night for Democrat Teresa Leyba Ruiz over Kimberly Yee, and Oklahoma elected Republican Robert Franklin; both are open seats in states that matter to our members, and both new chiefs take office in January.

8. What Tuesday Did Not Change

It is worth being precise about what stays exactly where it was. The Head Start proposed rule from August 7 drew about 40,000 comments, including objections from 190 Democrats led by Sanders and Scott and from Republicans including Representatives Lawler and Kiley, over the staffing ratios and the cut in the administrative cap from 15 percent to 5 percent; the comment period closed October 6 and the rule is in the agency's hands, not Congress's. The EDGAR proposed rule has 5,510 comments and no final rule; the Department has not said when it will act, and a new majority cannot withdraw a rule, only pressure the agency or legislate around it. The pocket rescission from September 25 is in court in California, New York and the District of Columbia, and the one-year funds at issue expired September 30 regardless of who won on Tuesday. And the FY 2027 budget request that proposed consolidating Part D National Activities into Part B State Grants is still the administration's request; the next one, for FY 2028, arrives in February and there is no reason to expect the consolidation proposal to disappear from it. But remember, that is just the President’s request, not Congress.

Thank you, as always, for the work you do and for staying engaged in this part of it. The next two months are a strange overlap: one Congress finishing, another preparing, and a Department operating in between. We have more friends in the room than we did last week. Now we have to give them something to carry.

With appreciation and resolve,

Kait Brennan, PhD

Policy Advisor, Teacher Education Division, Council for Exceptional Children

Sources: Associated Press race calls as reported by PBS NewsHour (November 3, 2026, 11:46 PM) and Forbes (November 4, 2026); AP results for North Carolina District 5 (uncalled as of November 4, 8:22 AM UTC); Politico Pro, Democrats win control of Congress, here is what that means for education policy (Mackenzie Wilkes, November 4, 2026); Politico Pro Morning Education (November 4, 2026); Politico Pro, Bernie Sanders could soon get a powerful perch (Jordain Carney, October 25, 2026); Politico Pro, Bonamici jumps into House education committee leadership race (October 6, 2026); Politico Inside Congress and Budget newsletters (October 13 and 19, 2026); Congress.gov, H.R. 6500, Public Law 119-103, and H.R. 9260, H. Rept. 119-696; Murray and Baldwin letter to Secretary McMahon (October 13, 2026); IES fiscal 2027 funding opportunities page (84.324T and 84.305J, read October 22, 2026); NBC News governor results (November 4, 2026) and KCUR (Kansas governor count, November 4, 2026); MultiState and Capital B Atlanta (Georgia superintendent); California Secretary of State unofficial returns; Spotlight PA and the Philadelphia Inquirer (Pennsylvania legislature); Office of Management and Budget special message of September 25, 2026 and GAO B-338788; Politico Pro Inside Congress (November 4, 5 and 6, 2026), Budget and Appropriations Brief (November 4 and 5, 2026) and Morning Education (November 5 and 6, 2026); Politico Pro, Scott warns McMahon of criminal penalties (November 4, 2026) and Richard Barrera prevails in race for California schools superintendent (November 5, 2026); Philadelphia Inquirer and Spotlight PA (November 4, 2026, state Senate call); Ballotpedia general election returns for North Carolina District 5, the Georgia and South Carolina superintendents and the Pennsylvania governor (read November 7, 2026); KTAR (Arizona superintendent, November 6, 2026); News 9 (Oklahoma superintendent, November 4, 2026); FOX6 Milwaukee (Wisconsin legislature, November 3, 2026); Congress.gov API (H.R. 6500 and P.L. 119-103, read November 7, 2026); Federal Register API (Department of Education documents since October 22, read November 7, 2026).

A nonpartisan, informational summary for TED membership. The views expressed in this update are those of the author and do not represent an official position of TED or CEC unless stated. Election results are reported as called by the Associated Press and were still changing at the time of writing.