The U.S. Senate’s top health and labor panel took up the sprawling mess of college athletics Thursday, and the central fight came down to a question that could reshape how millions of student-athletes live and work: Are they employees?
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing March 26 in Washington focused on the future of college sports, with testimony from athletes, administrators and policy experts. The session surfaced deep disagreements not just between parties but within them, particularly around whether federal law should recognize college athletes as employees entitled to labor protections, bargaining rights and benefits.
Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the HELP Committee, opened by framing the problem bluntly. The current college sports system, he said, is “just replacing one unfair system for another.” He pointed specifically to name, image and likeness deals, the 2021 NCAA policy change that allowed athletes to profit from their own identities. Cassidy argued that short-term NIL paydays are crowding out the value of an education and weakening support for Olympic sports and women’s athletics.
Those concerns set the table for a hearing that stretched well beyond booster deals and transfer portals. What senators actually spent much of their time debating was labor law and what happens if college athletics gets dragged fully into it.
What Mikayla Pivec told the Senate
Among the most direct testimony came from Mikayla Pivec, a professional basketball player who starred at Oregon State before the NIL era. She told the committee she worked more than 50 hours per week as a college athlete and earned less than $8 an hour from a $1,600 monthly stipend. To cover her basic expenses, she took a job with a food delivery service and collected cans.
“The NCAA has failed and continues to fail to protect and respect college athletes,” Pivec told the committee.
She was careful to note that NIL has improved some athletes’ situations but argued the gains are narrower than headlines suggest. “NIL has helped some players, but most still earn less than $10 an hour and struggle to pay for basic necessities,” she said.
Her testimony went beyond compensation. Pivec said she had a foot injury that required surgery and was denied an MRI every time she requested one during her playing career. The denial, she argued, reflects a system that treats athletes as assets to be managed rather than people entitled to medical care.
Pivec is now co-founder and organizing director of the United College Athletes Association, a players’ group pushing for protections, education access and fair pay for college athletes. Her presence at the hearing signaled that organized athlete advocacy is no longer operating only at the margins of this debate. It is sitting in front of Senate panels and putting specific grievances on the record.
The employee question
The most politically charged moment of the hearing came around the question of employment classification. Whether college athletes should legally be considered employees of their universities carries enormous consequences. Employee status would open the door to collective bargaining, workers’ compensation claims, minimum wage protections and potentially health benefits. It would also expose universities to significant new costs and compliance obligations.
Jim Banks, the Indiana Republican, offered a candid read of where the politics actually stand. “I think the political dynamic is that Republicans and Democrats aren’t that far off from what we agree on,” he said. “It’s just this one small issue that gets in the way from us passing something related to unionization and how we treat student-athletes, whether we treat them as employees or not.”
That framing matters. Banks was describing a situation where bipartisan agreement on the broad shape of college sports reform may exist, but the employee classification question is functioning as a hard stop. For many Republicans, classifying athletes as employees crosses a line they will not cross legislatively. For advocates of stronger athlete protections, leaving employee status off the table means any reform has a ceiling.
The committee did not resolve that tension Thursday, and none of the testimony suggested a resolution is near.
The broader mess Congress is trying to untangle
The hearing came at a moment when college athletics is operating in genuine legal and regulatory chaos. Schools and athletes are navigating a patchwork of state NIL laws that vary significantly from state to state, making compliance difficult for multi-state athletic programs. Booster collectives, the donor groups that pool money to fund NIL payments to athletes, operate with limited oversight and inconsistent structures.
The transfer portal, which allows athletes to change schools more freely than before, has generated persistent complaints from coaches and administrators about roster instability, while advocates argue it is one of the few meaningful protections athletes currently have.
Last year, a federal judge approved a nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that cleared the way for schools to directly share revenue with athletes. That settlement, involving the NCAA and major conferences, represented the most significant structural shift in college sports compensation in decades. But it also created new questions about how direct pay gets structured, who qualifies and what legal frameworks govern the relationship between schools and the athletes they pay.
President Donald Trump complicated the timeline further this month when he convened a White House roundtable on college athletics and pledged to issue an executive order that would reshape the system. As of the hearing Thursday, that order had not materialized, but the promise of executive action adds another variable to an already crowded policy environment. Congress typically does not love the idea of the White House acting unilaterally in a space where legislators are actively trying to write law.
What actually fixing this would require
The core challenge Congress faces is that any federal framework for college sports has to answer at least three questions that pull against each other.
First, how much can or should schools pay athletes, and under what structure. Revenue sharing models differ sharply from scholarship-plus-NIL models, and the tax and legal implications of each are not trivial.
Second, what federal floor of protections applies to college athletes regardless of what their school or state does. Medical coverage, injury protections and academic support are all areas where advocates like Pivec argue current arrangements fall far short.
Third, and most politically loaded, whether the federal framework includes any employment classification or bargaining rights for athletes. This is where bipartisan agreement frays. Republicans broadly oppose classifying athletes as employees. Democrats are more split, with some backing stronger labor protections and others worried about the impact on smaller programs and non-revenue sports.
Cassidy’s framing at the top of the hearing, criticizing NIL as a system that prioritizes short-term money over education and weakens women’s and Olympic sports, suggests the committee chair is looking for a model that constrains some of the current market dynamics rather than simply codifying them. Whether he can build a majority around that vision, given the employee classification fight sitting in the middle of any deal, is a different question.
What Detroit athletes and families should watch
For Michigan families with athletes in college or heading there, this hearing matters even if the policy outcomes feel distant. The Detroit metro sends a significant number of athletes to programs across the Big Ten and other major conferences. How NIL gets structured federally will affect what those athletes can negotiate, what protections they have if they get hurt and whether the transfer portal survives in its current form.
Schools like Michigan and Michigan State are already operating under revenue-sharing frameworks shaped by the antitrust settlement. A federal law that overrides or supplements that settlement could change the financial picture for athletes at those programs, for better or worse depending on which provisions survive the legislative process.
The HELP Committee hearing Thursday was one step in a process that has been moving slowly for years. Congress has been discussing federal NIL legislation since at least 2020, and no bill has cleared both chambers. The pressure from the settlement, the executive order threat and organized athlete advocacy like Pivec’s association may be changing the urgency. But Thursday’s session made clear the hardest fight, over whether the athletes at the center of a multi-billion dollar industry have the legal status of workers, is still ahead.
