Federal grants to replace expensive textbooks with free digital course materials

What it does

This bill amends the Museum and Library Services Act to authorize federal grants to colleges and universities for creating and adopting free, publicly available digital textbooks in science, technology, engineering, and math courses. The grants prioritize institutions serving low-income and minority students, and require collaboration between librarians and faculty to replace expensive commercial textbooks with open educational resources, potentially saving students thousands of dollars per degree.

Why we flagged it

The bill's operative mechanism is a federal grant program designed to reduce textbook costs for college students by funding the adoption and creation of free, publicly available digital course materials. This is a direct affordability intervention targeting a documented cost burden.

What the text implies

• Textbook publishers (Pearson, Cengage, McGraw-Hill) face potential revenue loss if institutions successfully shift to open materials; the bill does not mandate adoption, but creates financial incentive to do so.
• Success depends on faculty willingness to adopt open materials and institutional capacity to create/adapt them; institutions with weak library infrastructure or faculty resistance may struggle to deploy grants effectively.
• The 2-year reporting requirement (subsection d(4)) creates accountability for measuring student savings and course adoption rates, but does not mandate continuation of the program beyond initial grants.
• Priority weighting toward low-income and minority-serving institutions may create unequal access to grant funding across the higher education sector, though this is intentional equity design.

Section numbers refer to the bill text the analysis read — linked under Primary records below.

Who it affects

Students, particularly low-income and minority students at prioritized institutions, gain direct financial relief from replacing expensive textbooks with free digital alternatives. The bill creates no new restrictions on citizens and directs federal resources toward reducing a documented cost burden on college students.

Who stands to gain

• college and university students (direct savings on textbook costs)
• institutions of higher education (grant funding for library and faculty coordination)

Named in the bill

Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Director of IMLS, institutions of higher education, science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) departments, library administrators and librarians, low-income and minority students

Where it stands

1 cosponsor: 1 Democrats.

• Dec 12, 2025 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in House”
• Dec 12, 2025 — Referred to House Committee on Education and Workforce · Congress.gov: “Referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce”

Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.

Money around this bill

3 lobbying clients named this bill on 4 disclosure filings across 2 quarters, Dec 2025 to Jun 2026. Those filings disclosed $2,851,032 in lobbying spend. A filing names 40 bills on average, so that figure is what each filing reported, not a share belonging to this bill.

More lobbying clients named this bill than 61% of bills with at least one filing.

Bill Foster, the sponsor, reported $894,500 in PAC receipts in the 2026 cycle.

• National Multifamily Housing Council Inc — $1,560,000 on 1 filing
• Mortgage Bankers Association — $1,220,000 on 1 filing
• American Council on Education — $71,032 on 2 filings

Lobbying Disclosure Act filings through Jul 20, 2026. A filing shows who paid to lobby on a bill it names, not what changed.