Federally Requiring Earned Education-Debt Discharges for Vets Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. LAMB. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding. I thank my colleague from Kansas for his excellent support and work on this bill, as well.
People often ask me when I go home to western Pennsylvania whether we ever knock off all the fighting down here and do some actual work and work across the aisle between Congress and the White House to actually get things done. What you are seeing here in this Chamber today is an example of the fact that there are many of us down here who are very serious about making that happen and making it happen more often as we go forward.
The FREED Act responded to a very specific set of circumstances, which is that it has long been true that, if you are a 100 percent disabled veteran, you have your Federal student loans forgiven. But we all know there is a big difference between putting something down on paper and making it happen in real life, and we were seeing huge numbers of disabled veterans not take advantage of this program either because they didn't know about it or because the process of applying for it was just too burdensome, there was too much paperwork, or it took too long.
If you have a 100 percent disability rating, there is a lot in your life you have to worry about besides doing paperwork; so Congressman Watkins, Congressman Fitzpatrick and another great western Pennsylvanian, Congressman Guy Reschenthaler, and I were all looking at the same set of facts and said: We know what we need to do here. We already know these people have a 100 percent disability rating. Let's just make the loan forgiveness automatic. That was the genesis for this bill.
I want to acknowledge that the administration and President Trump did the right thing here. They noticed this same problem last year, and they began to automatically forgive these loans by executive order. The problem was that there was some legal uncertainty about exactly who had the authority to forgive the loans how fast and when.
Our understanding is that some disputes developed between OMB and the Department of Education, and it was slowing down the ability of veterans to take advantage of this thing that they are already entitled to by virtue of how much they have given to this country. So our bill was necessary to make sure that everybody involved knew they have the legal authority to forgive these loans.
By this time next year, assuming we are able to get this through the Senate and to the President's desk for his signature, that number you heard from Congressman Courtney of 25,000 veterans whose loans are in default and an even higher number of tens of thousands more who haven't taken advantage of that should be zero.
We are making an unequivocal statement today that, if you have given so much to this country that you have a 100 percent disability rating, you do not need to worry about your Federal student loans any longer.
It is our job to remove obstacles from the paths of people who have given so much to this country. We all believe that there is much to be done on the subject of student loans, but what we want to make sure is that these brave Americans are first in line when we do that, and that is what our bill does.
It is very common in America these days to hear people spot a veteran and say, ``Thank you for your service.'' I think the important thing about this bill is that it is Republicans and Democrats, Congress and the President all working together to say, ``Thank you for your service''--not only in words, but in actions. That is what this bill means.
I am so grateful to have had the support of so many hardworking Members who look forward to seeing this bill pass today, and I urge all my colleagues to support it.
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