Providing for Consideration of Conference Report on H.R. 2669, College Cost Reduction and Access Act

PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 2669, COLLEGE COST REDUCTION AND ACCESS ACT -- (House of Representatives - September 07, 2007)

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Mr. McKEON. I thank the gentleman for yielding the time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the rule. This rule would provide for consideration of fiscally irresponsible legislation that would create costly new entitlement programs and misdirect billions of aid toward colleges, universities, college graduates and philanthropic organizations rather than the low-income students who need the help the most.

My colleagues who were around in the last Congress may remember that when we passed a real budget reconciliation bill, the Education and Workforce Committee found some $18 billion plus in savings, two-thirds of which we directed towards deficit reduction and one-third of which we directed towards increased student benefits such as higher loan limits, more grant aid for low-income, high-achieving students, and loan forgiveness for high-demand teachers. Unfortunately, H.R. 2669, the bill that will be before us today, takes us in a drastically different direction.

The rule before us provides for the culmination of months of abuse of the budget reconciliation process as a backdoor way to implement significant changes to programs best addressed through regular order. Not a single committee hearing has been held on this legislation. The potential impact of many of its student loan cuts has never been weighed, and no one has provided adequate reasons regarding why the new entitlement programs and complex student loan auction scheme created under the conference report are necessary or fiscally reasonable.

It eliminates the right of parents to choose their lender and replaces consumer choice with a government-run auction system that is complex, burdensome and untested. And all of this will be put into place in a couple of weeks time. I'm anxious to see how the department puts this into place.

This measure could have been improved by infusing more savings into the Pell Grant Program. Pell is a proven success that has helped millions of young people attend college. In the time during the last 12 years that we were in charge, we have increased Pell Grant spending double. As the chairman just pointed out, the amount of what he talked about, the individual aid to each individual student, has remained fairly even, but the amount that we have put in has been increased like a billion dollars a year over that period of time because we have a million and a half more students that have now been able to take advantage of that and use the money for their help in getting their chance to achieve the American Dream.

By creating a bundle of new entitlement programs complete with new bureaucracy, rules, and regulations, this conference agreement places billions of dollars in new Federal spending on autopilot with no accountability to taxpayers whatsoever, completely opposite of what the real purpose of reconciliation is for.

The purpose of reconciliation, requiring an easier passage by only requiring 50 votes in the Senate, was set up to reduce mandatory spending and to save money on the budget deficit. And this will actually increase and go just the opposite direction.

And finally, let me be perfectly clear: I have absolutely no confidence in the Department of Education's ability to implement the changes outlined in this conference agreement, particularly with the timeline it sets. It gives me no pleasure to point out this obvious fact, particularly in a Republican administration, but it's true. And sadly, we will be watching this failure play out in the coming months and years.

The rule allows consideration of a conference report that breaks promises to students and taxpayers alike. I urge my colleagues to join me in opposing it.

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