U.S. House Fails to Reauthorize 20-Year-Old Bipartisan Bill to Fund Rural Schools and Communities

Montana and other western states will miss out on millions in funding from the Secure Rural Schools bill, which passed the Senate but failed to garner Republican support to pass in the House

By Alex Baumhardt for States Newsroom

Superior High School in Superior, Montana. Mineral County received nearly $900,000 this year in funding through the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act (Photo by Darrell Ehrlick of the Daily Montanan).

Schools in 30 of Oregon’s 36 counties — and schools in other Western states — will receive less federal funding in 2025 after the U.S. House of Representatives failed to reauthorize a 24-year-old bill that typically pays up to $80 million a year for schools and roads in Oregon along with wildfire prevention and conservation work.

In Montana, 32 counties received $16 million in 2023, according to U.S. Forest Service data.

Montana Independent News Note:

Carbon County Commissioner Bill Bullock explained that Carbon County does not accept funds allocated in the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act because it would require the County to increase property taxes via a permissive levy and they believe it is not reliable funding. Their decision means Carbon County’s budget and schools remain unaffected by this federal failure to act.

The bipartisan Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act — first passed in 2000 — was reauthorized by the Senate in November. But by Friday, in the run-up to passage of a stop-gap spending bill to keep the government open until March, House Republicans could not reach agreement about how the rural schools bill should be funded and so it died without a vote, said Hank Stern, a spokesman for Oregon’s senior senator, Democrat Ron Wyden, who co-authored the original bill in 2000. Wyden said the failure to approve the money will create needless pain for rural communities.

“This sad state of affairs due to congressional Republican failings is pointless and regrettable,” he said in an email. “Oregonians living and working in counties that have long relied on millions in federal Secure Rural Schools funds will needlessly and unfortunately enter 2025 with an uncertain fate for those resources when it comes to local schools, roads, law enforcement and more.”

Idaho Senator Mike Crapo, a Republican who worked with Wyden to get the bill passed in the Senate, said in an email he shared Wyden’s frustration.

“Senator Wyden and I worked diligently to secure SRS funding for rural counties,” Crapo said.

The Republicans decided not to vote on the bill amid a dispute about health care funding that would have killed the stop-gap bill, Stern said.

The Secure Rural Schools bill for years has sent hundreds of millions of dollars to counties in 41 states and Puerto Rico that have federal land within their borders. Because those counties provide critical services to people and industries using those lands for activities that generate revenue for the federal government – such as animal grazing and timber production — the federal government sends money back to those counties to help them pay for critical services and to weather other changes.

In the West, the money has largely helped keep county and school budgets whole following reduced logging and a reduction in timber revenue from federal forests in the 1990s to save imperiled species. The payments have equaled the average amount counties received from timber harvests from the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management in the top three timber-producing years of the 1980s. Oregon has received $4 billion in funding from the bill in the last 24 years.

This year, 30 counties in Oregon got nearly $74 million through the act, according to Wyden’s office. And in 2023, according to the latest U.S. Forest Service data, 12 counties in Alaska received $12.6 million; 34 counties in Idaho got $25 million; 32 counties in Montana received $16 million; and 25 counties in Washington state received about $18 million.

In recent years, the bill has been championed on a rotating basis by Wyden or a Republican senator from Idaho. Stern said that this year, Wyden had leaned on Crapo to advocate for the bill’s passage in the Republican-controlled House.

Crapo, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said he’ll push for the bill next year when he’ll take the reins of the committee under Republican control of the Senate.

“I will continue to advocate for this legislation during the upcoming Trump administration,” said Crapo.

Wyden, now Finance Committee chair who will become the ranking member next year, said he’ll be pushing for passage, too.

“I am committed to working with anybody, anywhere at the start of the new year who’s serious about reauthorizing these vital investments ASAP for rural communities in Oregon and nationwide,” Wyden said.

This story was originally produced by the Oregon Capital Chronicle which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network, including the Daily Montanan, supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.