The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a markup on July 22, 2026 on S. 1874, the Title VIII Nursing Workforce Reauthorization Act of 2025. The bill, if it clears committee and passes the full Senate, would reauthorize federal funding for nursing education programs under Title VIII of the Public Health Service Act — the primary federal mechanism for investing in the nursing workforce pipeline since 1964.
S. 1874 was introduced by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and carries bipartisan co-sponsorship including Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). The House companion bill, H.R. 3593, was introduced by Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL). A committee markup is a procedural step where members debate and potentially amend a bill before voting on whether to advance it to the full chamber — today's action represents the furthest the bill has advanced in this Congress.
What Title VIII Funds and Why It Matters Now
Title VIII of the Public Health Service Act has been the backbone of federal nursing workforce investment since President Johnson signed it in 1964 as part of the Nurse Training Act. In its current form, Title VIII programs include the Nursing Workforce Diversity program (targeting recruitment and retention of students from disadvantaged or underrepresented backgrounds), the Advanced Nursing Education grants (supporting graduate-level APRN training programs), the Nurse Education, Practice, Quality and Retention grants, and the National Nurse Loan Repayment and Scholarship programs.
The last full reauthorization of Title VIII was enacted in 2020, and programs under the act have been operating under a series of short-term extensions and continuing resolutions that limit the ability of nursing schools and workforce programs to plan and commit to multi-year investments. A full reauthorization, with updated funding levels that reflect post-pandemic nursing school costs and wages, would allow programs to sign longer-term contracts, hire permanent faculty positions rather than adjunct staff, and invest in infrastructure like simulation labs and clinical placement systems.
The nursing workforce shortage context makes the timing significant. BLS projects approximately 189,000 registered nurse job openings annually through 2033 — a demand that nursing schools are structurally constrained from meeting at current capacity. The AACN's most recent data shows that U.S. nursing schools turned away 65,766 qualified applicants from nursing programs in 2024 due to insufficient faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, and clinical preceptors. Title VIII programs directly address several of these bottlenecks: faculty development grants support master's and doctoral preparation for clinical educators; workforce diversity programs expand the recruitment base; loan repayment programs incentivize nurses to take lower-paying faculty and rural practice positions that would otherwise be economically unviable.
What the Bill Would Change
S. 1874 would reauthorize Title VIII programs through fiscal year 2030 and make several targeted updates to program structure. Key provisions include increased authorization levels for nursing workforce diversity grants to reflect current program costs, expanded eligibility for advanced nursing education grants to include clinical nurse specialist training alongside NP and CRNA programs, and updated loan repayment amounts under the Nurse Corps Scholarship and Loan Repayment Program to improve their competitiveness against the private sector wage growth nurses have seen since 2020.
The bill also addresses a persistent gap in the current law: the lack of dedicated funding for nursing faculty development in community college and associate degree settings. Most Title VIII graduate education grants have historically flowed to university-based programs. S. 1874 includes provisions to specifically support faculty preparation programs at community colleges, which train the majority of entry-level RNs and face the most acute faculty shortages. This provision aligns with the emerging state-level recognition — like Wisconsin's emergency rule allowing BSN-prepared RNs with clinical experience to teach — that the traditional master's degree pathway alone is insufficient to close the faculty gap at scale.
Relevance for Working Nurses and Nursing Schools
For working nurses, the most immediately relevant Title VIII provision is the Nurse Corps Loan Repayment Program. The program pays up to 85% of nursing education debt for nurses who commit two years (with an option for a third year) of service at Critical Shortage Facilities — federally designated facilities in areas with insufficient access to nursing care. Title VIII reauthorization would maintain and potentially strengthen this program at a time when nursing student debt has risen significantly alongside tuition increases. A nurse graduating from a four-year BSN program in 2026 with $60,000–$80,000 in loans is a different economic situation than the program was designed for in 2020, and updated benefit levels are necessary for the program to retain its recruitment power.
For nursing schools, the most significant impact would come from the Advanced Nursing Education grants and faculty development programs. Schools running NP and CRNA programs at capacity have been constrained by the short-term nature of current Title VIII funding extensions. A full five-year reauthorization with updated authorization levels would allow programs to commit to faculty hires and clinical partnership agreements with multi-year terms — the kind of stability required to actually build program capacity rather than maintain it.
The broader workforce math is straightforward: the US needs more nurses, producing more nurses requires more nursing school capacity, more nursing school capacity requires more qualified faculty, and more qualified faculty requires federal investment in faculty preparation that the market alone does not provide. Title VIII is the federal mechanism for that investment. Its continued lapse — even under continuing resolution funding — is a slow-moving constraint on the pipeline. Today's markup represents the most concrete legislative progress on reauthorization in this Congress.