The One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s “do no harm” (DNH) provision creates a new statutory earnings-based accountability system for nearly all Title IV degree programs. Programs fail if federally aided completers’ median earnings four years after completion fall below required benchmarks in two of three years. But the statute leaves key implementation details unresolved, requiring the US Department of Education to define critical terms, data rules, and procedures through negotiated rulemaking.

Why This Matters

The DNH provision could reshape program eligibility for federal loans, affecting students’ access, institutional behavior, and federal oversight of higher education value. Because the statute is broad but operationally incomplete, negotiated rulemaking choices will determine whether the DNH provision is fair, accurate, and workable—especially for small programs, graduate and professional fields, and institutions in Puerto Rico and the US territories. The design decisions will influence which programs are sanctioned, how comparable benchmarks are set, and whether institutions can meaningfully appeal results.

What We Found

Our analysis highlights several implementation decisions where the Department of Education will need to balance accuracy, equity, and administrative feasibility:

• Small cohort rules create major trade-offs. The DNH provision requires aggregating cohort years until at least 30 federally aided completers have earnings data and then aggregating across programs of similar length if needed. But the statute does not specify how many years to pool before combining programs, raising concerns that long pooling windows may reflect outdated program conditions and unevenly expose small programs to shifting labor market cycles.
• “Similar length” and program aggregation need clear definitions. Programs vary widely in time-to-degree and credit requirements. Although Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes will likely support aggregation, the appropriate level (two, four, or six digits) remains contested: More aggregation improves coverage but increases the risk of combining substantively different programs and masking performance.
• Graduate field-of-study benchmarks are hard to operationalize. Many graduate and professional programs (e.g., law or medicine) do not map neatly onto undergraduate “same field” comparisons, raising both technical and potential statutory authority questions.
• Appeals require careful scoping. A gainful employment–like “calculation error only” model is administratively clean but may be too narrow given the DNH provision’s reliance on aggregation decisions and potential interest in alternative data sources (which come with comparability limitations).
• Territories and Puerto Rico pose unresolved data and policy risks. Prior gainful employment and financial value transparency experience suggests serious measurement gaps; the DNH provision’s statutory design complicates the path to exemptions and raises potential avoidance concerns.

How We Arrived at Our Findings

We convened a cross-sector group of higher education policy experts—including researchers and current and former Department of Education and congressional staff members—to identify the most consequential definitional, legal, and data challenges that negotiated rulemaking must resolve. This brief synthesizes the major themes that emerged and translates them into concrete implementation questions and trade-offs, drawing on prior lessons from gainful employment and financial value transparency to anticipate where DNH design choices are most likely to shape outcomes.