Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under the Rule Submitted By the Department of Education Relating to ``Improving Income Driven Repayment for the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program and the Federal Family Education Loan (Ffel) Program''

Floor Speech

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Mrs. McCLAIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Foxx for yielding time.

I want to remind the American people that every time someone says the government pays, the government will pay, it is not the government because the government doesn't produce anything.

When they refer to the government, they refer to you, the American taxpayer, will pay. The government doesn't pay. The American taxpayer pays.

I want to clear that up just to make sure every time we hear the government will pay, that is really the hardworking American people. The government is just choosing how they spend the American taxpayers' money.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this H.J. Res. 88, a Congressional Review Act resolution of disapproval I introduced to block President Biden's extreme student loan giveaway.

This new regulation, ironically dubbed the SAVE plan, is the most expensive regulation in our Nation's history and is a backdoor attempt to ram the administration's socialist free college fantasy down the throats of hardworking taxpayers. It is their money.

According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, this plan will cost as much as $559 billion over the next decade, far exceeding the price tag of the President's illegal student loan bailout ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Further, the Biden administration's plan would completely ruin our postsecondary education financing system, putting higher costs on taxpayers who never attended college in the first place.

I can't buy a house. I choose not to buy a house, but my neighbor chooses to buy a house, and then I get to foot the bill. That is what this administration is asking us to sign up for unconstitutionally.

Experts from across the political spectrum agree that Biden's income- driven repayment plan makes repayment the exception instead of the norm.

Just 2 in 10 undergraduate borrowers will fully repay their loans, and the average student will pay roughly half of what is borrowed from taxpayers in the first place.

Not only does this plan shift the cost of loans from the borrower, the person who actually took out the loan, it shifts the cost to the person who never took the loan out to begin with, the hardworking taxpayer.

It also will make college more expensive. Under the President's plan, colleges will continue to increase prices and force students to actually have to borrow more that they don't need to repay, knowing that this is ultimately the hardworking taxpayers who will foot the bill.

The Congressional Budget Office even estimates that the SAVE plan will increase student borrowing by $100 billion over the next decade. Increasing costs by $100 billion--I am not sure what is saved.

In other words, the President is forcing through the most expensive regulation in history, increasing prices to attend college--well, that doesn't make any sense--and then telling taxpayers, many of them who didn't attend college, or if they already did attend college, they get to pay off their loans and somebody else's loans. They need to subsidize the ones who went to college even if they didn't go to college. This is unfair and unconstitutional.

The Biden administration is more concerned with scoring political points with his base through executive rule than actually fixing the student loan issue.

Republicans actually have a plan, one that is fiscally responsible like the FAIR Act that I introduced with Representative Owens and Chairman Foxx, that would actually fix the Democrat-created problems with our loan repayment system.

President Biden has attempted to write off as much as $1 trillion of student loans since taking office without congressional approval.

It is clear that President Biden and the unelected bureaucrats he has put in power have no respect for the hardworking taxpayers that he is forcing to foot the bill time and time again.

This administration has ignored the will of Congress and the Supreme Court, I might add, in his radical free college approach.

The Supreme Court said enough. The Education and Workforce Committee said enough. Now it's time for the House to say enough.

I strongly urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on H.J. Res. 88, reaffirm Congress' constitutional power of the purse, and defend taxpayers across the country.

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