Hold hearings on NEA use of federal taxpayer money

Research notes

• One negative search covered this ask and #857.
• House Education and the Workforce hearing and markup calendars (edworkforce.house.gov, six pages each) were swept for “NEA”, “National Education Association”, “teacher” and “union”. Senate HELP was not swept: the Quote says “Members” without naming a chamber, and the Chapter’s framing is a House oversight ask.

Checked 2026-09-06. The Status did not change; govinfo’s collection of published hearings was searched. The open question was whether a search of govinfo’s hearing collection would settle it, because the House Education and the Workforce calendar had been swept and Senate HELP, House Oversight and the appropriations subcommittees had not, none of them publishing a machine-readable hearing index.

govinfo’s search takes one query against the whole hearing collection, so every committee could be searched at once, for hearing volumes published between 2025-01-20 and 2026-09-06.

Control test first: the same search for a nonsense phrase returns 0, so a zero here would mean something. “National Education Association” returns 4 hearing volumes, and not one of them is about the NEA’s spending — Native American Education: Examining Federal Programs at the U.S. Department of Education (Senate, 2025-04-02), From Playground to Classroom: The Spread of Antisemitism in K-12 Schools (House, 2025-09-10), Immigration Policy by Court Order: The Adverse Effects of Plyler v. DOE (House, 2026-03-18) and the FY2026 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations hearings (2025-02-12). The Association is mentioned in the testimony; no hearing was held on how much federal money it has spent. Broadening to “teachers union” OR “teachers unions” returns 7 volumes and adds Reimagining Education: How Charter Schools Are Closing Gaps and Opening Doors, The State of American Education and three hearings in other policy areas — the same answer.

Reach: this covers every chamber and every committee, which the calendar sweep did not, and it covers only hearings whose volumes have been published. Hearing volumes are published well after the hearing itself, sometimes by more than a year, so a hearing held late in the window may not yet be in the collection. That is the one gap, and it is stated rather than papered over. Combined with the House Education and the Workforce calendar sweep above, the negative is as strong as the public record allows.