Floor Remarks by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
“Return to Repayment”
Monday, December 13, 2023
Mr. President,
In its relentless pursuit of cancelling student debt, the Department of Education seems to have forgotten that Congress gave it a job to do.
Last year, the Department announced its unconstitutional efforts to spend hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars, contrary to law, for forgiving student loans.
Even after this attempt was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, endless efforts at debt cancellation seem to have taken precedence over the duties Congress has given the Department.
For example, after being on pause for three years, student loan payments finally started back up in October of this year.
Servicers, students and members of Congress pressed for answers about how and when this process would work.
But instead of a plan, the return to repayment has been utter chaos.
Iowans, and even members of my staff, who have student loans, have waited for weeks to get answers to basic questions about their loans.
Due to sloppy record-keeping, the Department has failed its audit for the second year in a row.
In its hurry to cancel debt, the administration can’t even provide auditors enough information to do their jobs.
It isn’t just previous student who are being left in limbo.
There’s another issue that has been hard to get information on.
Current and incoming college students still can’t fill out the application form, which goes by the acronym FAFSA. That stands for “Free Application for Student Aid.”
In a normal year, students would fill it out in October and know early in the process whether they qualify for Pell Grants or other forms of student aid.
But this year, students still don’t have the information they need to start choosing the best school for them.
I have long said that students don’t have enough transparent information when applying to college.
The shortened timeline this year makes that even harder.
To address the problems I mentioned, I recently sent a letter with Senator Kaine of Virginia and other colleagues pressing the Department of Education to give students the information they need.
That includes making sure that farm families aren’t forced to sell the farm to send their kids to college.
It helps no one to lump small family farms in with the largest mega-farms as if farm families barely getting by are somehow rich, and their kids shouldn’t qualify for student loans.
Our bipartisan effort by Senator Kaine and me pushes the Department to recognize that distinction and ensure farm kids have the information they need to properly fill out the forms to see if they quality for student loans.
All students deserve to have the information they need and to get that information ahead of time.
Students, families and borrowers shouldn’t have their timelines delayed by changing political whims.
Congress certainly did not pass a law telling the Department to cancel hundreds of billions in student debt.
But Congress did give the Department a mandate to properly oversee student loan repayment, implement the FAFSA, and to keep its finances in order.
Before trying to unconstitutionally create enormous new cancellation programs, I suggest and encourage the Department of Education to do the jobs it has actually been given by Congress to do.
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