January brought the start of a new Congress in Washington, D.C., and the 87th Legislature’s session in Austin. In the Texas Capitol, it was the first time the biennial session began under such circumstances, with pandemic precautions adopted by both the House and Senate and heightened security in place following the January siege of the U.S. Capitol by rioters. While this made for an unusually slow start to the legislative process, House and Senate committee chairmanships were named relatively early on and many bills were filed in the first two months of the year. The slow start to the 87th Legislature in January — which dragged into February — afforded Government Relations additional time to prepare for the coming session storm and we continued laying the groundwork for success on a few critical areas of utmost interest to Rice, namely research funding opportunities, student financial aid, pandemic liability protections and issues of institutional autonomy. 
 
While the 117th Congress — with many new Texas delegation members — got underway 1,500 miles away in Washington, Government Relations spent a good deal of time lobbying two key aspects of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan for another round of pandemic relief funding. Foremost on our agenda was the need to address the almost blanket exclusion of private universities from the American Rescue Plan’s Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) funding. Coordinating with our colleagues from other private universities across the country, we made a strategic, weeks-long push with a bipartisan contingent of Texans on Capitol Hill to ensure private universities were included. At the same time, we sought to ensure that the emergency funding would not again include the 50% reduction for institutions that are subject to the endowment excise tax — an objectionable provision inserted into the 2020 year-end relief bill. We are happy to report that before the end of February, when the House Committee on Education and Labor voted on their piece of the American Rescue Plan, HEER funding to private universities had been restored and Rice’s allocation was not reduced by half.
 

In a year when the impact of a global pandemic made the need for United Way services more acute than ever before, Rice employees responded by setting a fundraising record. The 2020–2021 Rice United Way Campaign, led by University Relations and a committee of campus volunteers, wrapped up in January with a grand total of $286,478 contributed. For the past several years, Rice has been one of the top 50 institutional donors to the United Way of Greater Houston, whose programs benefit an estimated 2 million of our neighbors each year.