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Federal Education Control Debate
00:15:08
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Wow. | |
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| Senators questioned Education Secretary Linda McMahon about her department's 2026 budget proposal, which includes cuts to the bipartisan TRIO grant program designed to help people with low-income and underprivileged backgrounds. | ||
| Secretary McMahon also discusses student loan repayment, federal funds for higher education, and cuts to the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights. | ||
| She testified at a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing. | ||
| Good morning, everyone. | ||
| It's nice to be back. | ||
| And Secretary McMahon, thank you for getting us off to a good start here in the next work period. | ||
| Thank you for coming to discuss the President's fiscal year 2026 budget request and your priorities for the Department of Education. | ||
| I'm pleased to be joined this morning by my friend Senator Baldwin and ranking member. | ||
| She's been on a wild trip all through her state and so she's invigorated, right? | ||
| Definitely invigorated. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| As well as our full committee chair who will be joining us, Senator Collins and Vice Chair Senator Murray. | ||
| We're all committed to return the fiscal year 2026 appropriations process to regular order and these hearings are the first step in that process. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| All Americans should have the opportunity to receive a high quality education from preschool through post-secondary education. | ||
| I know that education is a key to success and vital part of maintaining our strong communities across the nation. | ||
| I've seen it certainly firsthand in my home state of West Virginia where I actually began my professional career as a college counselor and advisor working closely with many first-generation college students. | ||
| Through this role I was able to personally see how education provides students with life-changing opportunities. | ||
| Secretary McMahon, you have taken charge of the Department of Education at a critical time for our nation's students. | ||
| According to the latest national assessment of educational progress scores, students have still not recovered from pandemic-related school closures. | ||
| National scores on math and reading are worse than pre-pandemic levels in all tested grades. | ||
| And in reading, students scores continue to decline. | ||
| A third of eighth graders are not even reading at basic level. | ||
| And that, I think you would agree, all of us would agree, is unacceptable. | ||
| We know that throwing more money at the problem will not lead to a solution. | ||
| These devastating declines in achievement are in spite of almost $190 billion in COVID relief funding provided for elementary and secondary education during the pandemic. | ||
| Federal education spending at a minimum should be focused on ensuring that Americans' children can read and write at a basic level. | ||
| This is critical not only for children to flourish, but also for us as a nation to be competitive. | ||
| That is why I strongly believe that federal education spending should support states and policies that afford kids the greatest opportunity to learn and achieve academically. | ||
| Education decisions should be made by those closest to our students, those who know what they need to succeed. | ||
| That is, local schools, local teachers, local school boards, and most importantly, local parents who are right there with their students. | ||
| Formula grant programs like Title I, IDEA, and career and technical education provide the crucial flexibility that states and local communities need to best meet the needs of all students. | ||
| And I look forward to continuing to support these key programs in fiscal year 2026. | ||
| Madam Secretary, I'm pleased that your budget proposes to increase another important program, the Charter School Program. | ||
| While West Virginia is fairly new to offering charter school education, we are already seeing promising results in expanded opportunities for our public school students. | ||
| For example, the Wynn Academy in Bridge Valley at Bridge Valley Community and Technical College is an early college charter high school designed to provide a free, accelerated, dynamic degree program for juniors and seniors in the Canal Valley. | ||
| The school was started to help local hospitals address the severe shortage in nursing and has been so successful that it has already been expanded to include an advanced manufacturing track in partnership with Toyota. | ||
| Students are enrolled in the college and graduate and graduate from high school, ready to start their careers in high-need, well-paying jobs. | ||
| The school is meeting the intent of other charter schools, using the flexibility they are granted to offer innovative learning opportunities to benefit students. | ||
| With the additional funding for charter schools proposed in your budgets, I know that many more students across the country would benefit from opportunities like the West Virginia Wynn Academy. | ||
| Secretary McMahon, this is a pivotal time for our nation's student loan borrowers. | ||
| Borrowers have been forced to navigate an exceptionally confusing four years full of bad advice and unfair promises of illegal loan forgiveness from the prior administration. | ||
| And as a result, one in four student loan borrowers is either in default or on a late stage of delinquency on their loans as of the beginning of May. | ||
| And only 38 percent of borrowers are actually in repayment and current on their student loans. | ||
| After years of confusion, the Department must work to restore trust with borrowers by providing clear and consistent information about repayment. | ||
| Student loan borrowers deserve that clarity in order to fulfill their obligations to repay their loans. | ||
| I'm grateful that under your leadership, the department has begun the difficult task of getting borrowers back on the path to repayment, and I look forward to your continued progress. | ||
| Secretary McMahon, the fiscal year 2026 appropriations process will be challenging, but I look forward to working with you to responsibly allocate our limited taxpayers' resources to programs that help provide the best opportunity for high-quality education for all students. | ||
| Thank you again for being here today, and I look forward to your testimony. | ||
| Now I will turn to Senator Baldwin for her opening statement. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Good morning, and thank you, Chair Capito. | ||
| And Secretary McMahon, thank you for being here today. | ||
| We're here to talk about the President's fiscal year 2026 budget request for the Department of Education. | ||
| And I look forward to working with Chair Capito and all the members of this committee on developing a fiscal year 2026 appropriations bill that funds the Department of Education. | ||
| But before we can turn to the next fiscal year, 2026, the Department is still refusing to tell Congress and the American public how it is spending billions of taxpayer dollars this fiscal year. | ||
| The department was required to submit an operating plan last month detailing how it was spending fiscal year 2025 appropriated funding, and it included $13 billion in funding it characterized as unallocated. | ||
| That's flatly unprecedented and unacceptable. | ||
| This committee needs to know how you're planning to spend appropriated funding, and our constituents certainly deserve to know how their taxpayer dollars are being spent. | ||
| State and school districts need to know how much federal funding they should expect to receive starting in less than one month. | ||
| This administration obviously doesn't agree. | ||
| Ironically, the budget request for next fiscal year includes more detail than the spend plan for this year. | ||
| The lack of transparency combined with this budget request raises serious questions about what are you trying to hide and why. | ||
| This all stems in part, Madam Secretary, because this administration seems focused above all else on dismantling the Department of Education to score political points, regardless of the impact on tens of millions of students, including some 800,000 public school students in the state of Wisconsin. | ||
| Even issues I think we would agree are priorities, such as expanding career and technical education opportunities for students, will be undermined by this administration in the name of eliminating the department. | ||
| I am very concerned by reports that you are trying to move career and technical education programs to the Department of Labor against mandates from Congress and in a way that could harm students who participate in these vital programs. | ||
| There's simply no reason to take this administration at its word when its actions tell a different story. | ||
| It has shown time and again, the more forcefully it says one thing, the more it is doing the opposite. | ||
| So, Madam Secretary, you claim the administration's goal of eliminating the department is about returning education to the states. | ||
| At the same time, this administration is attempting to exert more control than ever over the decisions in our schools and campuses. | ||
| This includes demanding that states certify that they are not implementing DEI, which the department purposefully left vague so it could cut off funding whenever it chooses. | ||
| The department has reversed billions of approved spending extensions with the assertion that the department could pick and choose which congressionally authorized spending to approve or not. | ||
| And it includes the unprecedented assault on some of our college campuses to exert control over their classrooms and their daily operations. | ||
| You claim eliminating the department is not about cutting funding, but giving more flexibility to states and schools. | ||
| But at the same time, you are proposing a budget that would cut $12 billion from funding that supports students and educators. | ||
| This proposal would eliminate dedicated funding for evidence-based literacy instruction, support for homeless students, and rural schools. | ||
| The proposal would cut billions from programs that states and school districts can already flexibly use to meet pressing needs. | ||
| And in place of eliminating all these programs, the budget proposes a block grant a quarter of the size of the program that it replaces. | ||
| The budget proposes to cut more than half a billion from education research and statistics, virtually shutting down production of and support for using evidence to improve student achievement. | ||
| You are proposing to eliminate programs that support non-traditional students in higher education, including TRIO, Gear Up, and CCampus. | ||
| And you are proposing to drastically reduce the maximum Pell Grant award by almost $1,700, which have a devastating consequence for our nation's lowest income students, including those looking to acquire new skills to meet the needs of local employers and in-demand industries. | ||
| The math is simple. | ||
| This budget significantly cuts federal education funding. | ||
| This issue isn't just what's being proposed in this budget request, but what the department is doing right now. | ||
| Last month, the department decided to not continue $1 billion in multi-year grants that were improving access to mental health care in schools. | ||
| This includes funding provided on a bipartisan basis in response to the Uvalde school shooting that took the lives of 19 students and two teachers while injuring 17 others. | ||
| Madam Secretary, a recent survey revealed more than a third of Wisconsin's high school students reported feeling depressed, sad, or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row. | ||
| We need to be providing more mental health support for our students, not less. | ||
| The department claims that these grants were not in the federal government's interest. | ||
| I repeat that. | ||
| The department claims these grants were not in the federal government's interest, but refuses to provide specific reasons why they weren't continued. | ||
| This funding isn't simply numbers on a spreadsheet or receipts for a website. | ||
| This was more than 200 grants in nearly 40 states actively being used to increase the number of counselors and mental health professionals in schools. | ||
| That's how this administration defines providing more flexibility to schools, by pulling the rug out from under them when they're trying to address the mental health needs of students. | ||
| Finally, Madam Secretary, while this administration clearly wants to eliminate the Department of Education, Congress has not passed any law to do so. | ||
| Quite the opposite, in fact. | ||
| Just two and a half months ago, Congress passed an appropriations bill that provided funding to the Department of Education to carry out specific education laws, all laws that passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and that direct the Secretary of Education to carry out specific activities to help ensure every student receives a high-quality education. | ||
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Concerns Over Education Funding
00:15:22
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| I'm deeply concerned that you are planning to ignore this and will attempt to illegally impound funds and dismantle the Department of Education. | ||
| It will ultimately be students who will pay the price. | ||
| But if the executive branch is allowed to do that and ignore the laws we pass, I'm not sure what we're doing here. | ||
| Fortunately, I still have faith in this committee to reject that approach and to carry out our constitutional duties. | ||
| Most importantly, I know we can do better for our nation's students than what this administration is planning and what this budget proposes. | ||
| And I look forward to working with my colleagues to do just that. | ||
| Well, thank you, Senator Baldwin. | ||
| And you see, we've been joined by the chair of the full committee. | ||
| I'm going to ask the Secretary to give her opening statement first, and then I'll turn to the Chair. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Welcome, Secretary. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much, Chairman Capito, Ranking Member Baldwin, and distinguished members of the subcommittee. | ||
| Thank you for having me today to represent the goal I share with my boss, President Trump, to responsibly eliminate the federal bureaucracy, cut waste, and give education back to states, parents, and educators. | ||
| With your partnership, the fiscal 26 budget will take a significant step toward that goal. | ||
| We seek to shrink federal bureaucracy, save taxpayer money, and empower states who best know their local needs to manage their education in this country. | ||
| We have reviewed our programs and identified spending that does not fulfill the mandate of trust the American people have placed with President Trump. | ||
| We have cut old contracts that waste enriching private parties at taxpayer expense, suspended grants for illegal DEI programs, and now we're putting forward a responsible budget request that reduces department funding by more than 15 percent. | ||
| At the same time, we're working to make American education great again. | ||
| In our conversations with governors, teachers, and parents across the country, we hear calls for accountability and more local control. | ||
| That's our goal, to give parents access to the quality education their kids deserve, to fix the broken higher education industry that has misled students into degrees that don't pay off, and to create safe learning environments. | ||
| We're holding institutions to account when they facilitate discriminatory or hostile environments on campus. | ||
| A level playing field with limitless opportunity, I think, is a vision that we all can share. | ||
| Our budget reflects this vision. | ||
| Its cuts reflect a bureaucracy that is getting out of the way, and its continuations and increases represent smart spending that will help improve student achievement and not serve bureaucratic interests. | ||
| Our goal is clear, make education better, fairer, and more accountable by ending federal overreach and empowering families, schools, and states who best know the needs of their students. | ||
| I'm eager to partner with you to make the vision of the future a reality and to ensure every child is part of it. | ||
| Thank you, and I look forward to your questions. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And I'll turn to the chair of the full committee, Senator Collins from Maine. | ||
| Thank you very much, Madam Chair. | ||
| Madam Secretary, let me first welcome you to the committee. | ||
| I know that you care deeply about our students. | ||
| We may have different views on how to best achieve the goals that we share, but I do not question for a moment your deep commitment to education and our nation's students. | ||
| I've been very concerned that we've seen a drop in performance by our students that occurred since the COVID unwise closures and prolonged closures of schools and continued in the Biden administration. | ||
| And that's something that should concern us all. | ||
| I'd like to turn to the TRIO programs like Upward Bound. | ||
| That's an issue that you and I have discussed. | ||
| From my experience in Maine, I have seen the lives of countless first-generation and low-income students, not only in Maine, but across the country, who often face barriers to accessing a college education changed by the TRIO program. | ||
| I'm actually wearing my Maine TRIO pin today, just to emphasize my support for that program. | ||
| In fact, three of my own staff members went through the TRIO program and tell me that they would not have pursued higher education but for the support and confidence that the TRIO program gave them. | ||
| The President's budget, unfortunately, my view, proposes to eliminate the TRIO programs. | ||
| And as co-chair of the Congressional TRIO caucus, I strongly disagree with the President's proposal. | ||
| Could you explain why the administration has decided that TRIO programs are not worth the investment that they make in people's lives and the robust bipartisan support that they enjoy due to their success? | ||
| Want me to answer now? | ||
| Please. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And I know that these programs are very near and dear to your heart. | ||
| We have had at least two pretty lengthy conversations about them. | ||
| And TRIO will be funded through the end of this year. | ||
| So all those funds, you know, will go out. | ||
| But it is not proposed to continue in the 2026 budget. | ||
| What we found is the programs, while I absolutely agree that there is some effectiveness of the programs in many circumstances, these programs were negotiated at very tough terms in that the Department of Education has no ability to go in and look at the accountability of TRIO programs. | ||
| It specifically eliminates our ability to do that. | ||
| And I just think that we aren't able to see the effectiveness across the board that we would normally look to see with our federal spending. | ||
| So while there are, I think, many instances, and I believe also that Chairman Capito even worked in TRIO for a while in her earlier years, I do think there is effectiveness of many programs that I'm just not sure the total expenditure warrants. | ||
| I do know, however, that Congress does control the purse strings. | ||
| And I would sincerely hope that if you decide with appropriations to continue these programs, that we could work with you to renegotiate those terms that we feel kind of hamstrung the Department of Education and not being able to fully understand their accountability. | ||
| That's a real drawback in these programs. | ||
| And I think all of us would agree we want to make sure that anything that we are funding, we can attach accountabilities to it. | ||
| Well, as with the JobCorps program in the Department of Labor, I think the answer is to reform and strengthen those programs, fix what's wrong, increase accountability, not abolish them. | ||
| And I look forward to working with you in that regard. | ||
| I want to move to another issue, and that is a bill that Senator Kane and I have introduced called the Jobs Act. | ||
| What it does is allow students to access federal Pell Grants to pay for shorter-term job training programs. | ||
| A lot of times you can get a license in a trade to become an electrician or welder, for example, or a certified nursing assistant without going through a two-year community college program. | ||
| That may be the best option for some people. | ||
| It isn't for others. | ||
| Would you support the concept of allowing Pell Grants to be used for short-term training programs that result in a license or a certification for a job? | ||
| Well, you're really speaking my language, Senator, and thank you very much for that. | ||
| I wholeheartedly support these workforce Pell Grant options because I've seen in many instances, I mean, we have 8 million open jobs in our country. | ||
| Our workforce is definitely not being fulfilled by the proper workers. | ||
| So let's get these young people who don't need a four-year college education into the workforce sooner. | ||
| I'm in agreement that even when they're in high school, we should start these programs in high school leading into apprenticeship programs. | ||
| But the workforce Pell programs, the short-term you're talking about, I also think they can be stacked in credentials so that you can really propel yourself and to be a stronger economic contributor. | ||
| So I'm all for those. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Thank you, Madam Chair. | ||
| Sarah Baldwin. | ||
| Thank you, Madam Chair. | ||
| Secretary McMahon, during your confirmation hearing, when asked about spending appropriated funding, you said, quote, if they have been appropriated by Congress, those funds should be disseminated, close quote. | ||
| You also said that eliminating the department is not about cutting federal funding for schools. | ||
| Now we have a budget request that significantly cuts funding for public schools, students, and educators. | ||
| Now, a few days ago, the OMB director said that impoundment is still on the table, threatening to take funding away this year. | ||
| And we have your spending plan for this Year that still leaves more than $8 billion, in your own words, unallocated. | ||
| Not spending these funds is the Administration making a decision not to invest in our children, and that decision has real consequences. | ||
| What you consider unallocated for this year includes $1.3 billion for before and after school programs, which supports programs for thousands of students in Wisconsin in approximately 150 locations throughout the State, | ||
| and over $2 billion to support effective teachers, of which an estimated $23 million would provide evidence-based professional learning for educators and help address gaps in access to effective teachers in Wisconsin. | ||
| Are you going to allocate all of the funding Congress appropriated for students and schools in Wisconsin and across the country this year? | ||
| Well, Senator Baldwin, thank you very much for that question. | ||
| And I understand your concerns. | ||
| What we have done in putting forward our operating plan, the first operating plan to show where we were making allocations, and then followed up with the second operating system. | ||
| This isn't a nuanced question. | ||
| Congress passed a law appropriating this funding. | ||
| You said in your confirmation hearing that you would spend funding Congress appropriated. | ||
| If the answer isn't simply yes, based on all of the evidence before us, that leads me to believe that you are planning to withhold funding and shortchange schools, students, and families across America. | ||
| Well, we are going to continue to look at the allocations, and we would like to work with you as we continue to evaluate those programs. | ||
| We passed a continuing resolution that appropriated funding, and you said earlier that you were going to spend it as appropriated, as is signed into law. | ||
| So I am going to move on. | ||
| Secretary McMahon, when we met before your confirmation hearing, you told me that our students' mental health was a priority for you. | ||
| Yet you recently decided to discontinue mental health grants that Congress authorized and funded on a bipartisan basis because you determined, quote, they were not in the best interest of the federal government, close quote, which makes me wonder what changed since our conversation. | ||
| Your operating plan for fiscal year 2025 describes this funding as unallocated this year. | ||
| Your budget request for next year proposes eliminating this funding. | ||
| Secretary McMahon, do you believe increasing access to mental health supports for students is not in the best interests of the Federal Government? | ||
| We are not looking to eliminate this funding. | ||
| We are simply continuing the funding, but will allow the States to rebid on a competitive grant basis. | ||
| And we are evaluating those programs across States. | ||
| I think that a governor in the State or the local superintendent or the health care professionals that are working in that State have the best opportunity in looking at what is happening in their areas to make those requests for those grants. | ||
| And so that is what we are looking at. | ||
| Secretary McMahon, the grant that you discontinued for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction was being used to expand access to mental health care for students. | ||
| We are talking about more counselors and mental health professionals in schools. | ||
| Why did you cut off funding for this grant and take away this help for Wisconsin students and schools? | ||
| Well, because I think we have to look at it across the board, Senator. | ||
| And the goal really is to make sure that the money is being spent in the best way. | ||
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Cutting Resources for Borrower Defense
00:15:41
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| About training new school psychologists, like what you chose to discontinue at Alverno College in Wisconsin. | ||
| Do you think that's also not in the best interest of the federal government? | ||
| I believe there are a lot of programs that are in the best interest of the government, but the states and the local areas, I think, are the best place where we need to concentrate for these particular programs. | ||
| Thank you, Madam Chair. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Madam Secretary, I'm going to add my voice of concern with Senator Collins, and you and I have talked about this on the zeroing out, the elimination of the TRIO and gear-up programs. | ||
| You mentioned that I actually did work in one of these programs many years ago. | ||
| But my state and many of our states, but mine in particular, I think, has a lot of first-time collegegoers, a lot of students that don't have the aspirational goals either within their family. | ||
| They're not looking at how they can achieve education or a certificate or whatever. | ||
| And that's where I think these programs have been particularly useful. | ||
| So I would encourage that we look at this again, and we certainly will as a committee, because all of us have this issue within our states in terms of that first-time collegegoer or first or student that really needs the extra push, the camaraderie, the community that a lot of these, I've gone to their graduations and been their speaker, and it's really quite delightful to see how far they've come in a short period of time. | ||
| So I'm going to move on from that question. | ||
| I want to ask on anti-Semitism. | ||
| I am the morning before our education, the morning before our education last year, there were protesters at Columbia University asked. | ||
| I asked the then Secretary, how many people from the Office of Civil Rights have you had actually on the campus to see what's occurring there, to see what kind of violation of civil rights might be occurring on the Columbia University campus. | ||
| And apparently there was nobody there from the Office of Civil Rights. | ||
| Your budget proposes to decrease the Office of Civil Rights. | ||
| How are you, this is not a problem that's going away on our college campuses. | ||
| We see it now, now we've got a little bit of a break. | ||
| It's the summer. | ||
| How are you going to make sure that the department is taking to ensure that all students, and in this particular case, Jewish students, are able to learn in an environment free from intimidation? | ||
| Well, thank you very much, Senator Capodo. | ||
| I think it is pretty evident from the actions that we have taken relative to Columbia and looking into Harvard as well, and fulfilling the promise that President Trump made when he was campaigning that he would not tolerate anti-Semitism on our campuses or discrimination of any kind. | ||
| So I have personally met with first Katrina Armstrong, who was the president of Columbia when the first issue was addressed, and now with the second, Claire Shipman, who is there now. | ||
| We've talked about the issues on Columbia's campuses, and we have worked with them, I believe, in how we can solve some of these issues. | ||
| They have to set their policies and their priorities, and they have to enforce them. | ||
| They can't allow encampments on campuses. | ||
| They can't allow students to come on dressed with masks so that you can't identify these students. | ||
| I think they have to also vet the students who are coming in better to see what kind of backgrounds that they have. | ||
| Even professors who come on campuses, are they teaching ideology or more in subjects? | ||
| So I personally have done this in conversations with these presidents, with other presidents of universities, to understand what their policies are. | ||
| Our Office of Civil Rights has opened many cases looking at anti-Semitism, and we are actively enforcing that, as well as we have defunded some of Columbia's programs, $400 million there and about $2.2 billion with Harvard. | ||
| We're saying we mean business, these programs and policies have to have teeth. | ||
| They have to be enforced. | ||
| No student should have to go on campus and be afraid to go to class. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, I agree with the substance of what you're saying. | ||
| My concern is by cutting so much out of that particular, you're one person, you need the support and the backup of that office to be able to investigate these cases. | ||
| So I'll leave it at that. | ||
| Let's talk about literacy, because I mentioned it at my opening statement. | ||
| These test scores are very troubling, I think. | ||
| And you want to try to figure out how do we attribute to this? | ||
| It's not like there's not great teachers everywhere all around this country trying to figure out how to get their students' achievement moving up in the right direction. | ||
| I will say this, my state of West Virginia, the state legislature, in recognizing this, did allocate additional funds for reading teachers in the very early grades one through three to try to move our scores up because we have traditionally lower scores. | ||
| We did actually make it, that did make a difference. | ||
| Having that extra teacher in the classroom, we can pull a child aside, give them that one-on-one attention, really does make a difference. | ||
| How is the budget that you've put together is the answer to push it down to the States so that they can make those differences with our literacy and our math scores that we're falling behind? | ||
| I think it's a chief concern. | ||
| Well, certainly, I think just what you were talking about, at your state level, you put an extra teacher in the classroom because you recognize the need there. | ||
| I think that will make an incredible difference. | ||
| You know, there have been a lot of programs that have been tried to make sure that we could help students to read, and they've not worked. | ||
| But what we are seeing in states that are doing programs now that are returning to the science of reading, we saw it in Louisiana in the past NAPE scores. | ||
| We have seen it in Mississippi. | ||
| We have seen it in Iowa. | ||
| The children that are learning to read and can read by the end of third grade are those that have the greatest opportunity for success. | ||
| Up until third grade, we read to learn, and after that, I mean, we learn to read up through third grade, and then we read to learn after that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Durbin. | ||
| Thanks, Madam Chair, and welcome, Madam Secretary. | ||
| Since you're the Secretary of Education, I think it's maybe appropriate that we start questioning with a POP quiz. | ||
| Are you ready? | ||
| I never have liked POP quiz. | ||
| I never have either, but I'm going to give you the answers ahead of time. | ||
| The answers are 8 and 30. | ||
| 8 and 30. | ||
| Remember those two numbers. | ||
| What percentage of high school students in America attend for-profit colleges and universities? | ||
| 8 percent. | ||
| 8 percent, perfect. | ||
| What percentage of student loan defaults in America come from students in for-profit colleges and universities? | ||
| Must be 30. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Great. | ||
| You just aced the test. | ||
| But the problem is that the difficulties students face becomes a lifetime problem. | ||
| Imagine, if you will, first-generation college student trying to pick a place to go to school, inundated in high school with glossy brochures for for-profit colleges and universities which promise the sun, the moon, and the stars. | ||
| The student goes and learns that there are Pell Grants available through for-profit colleges and universities. | ||
| They hear the promises that if they just attend this school and graduate, there's going to be a good paying job at the end of the rainbow. | ||
| And it turns out it's all phony. | ||
| Over and over again, these students are being deluded and deceived. | ||
| There's much more scam than there is scholarship. | ||
| There's more hype than there is higher education. | ||
| So most of them, or at least 30 percent of them, end up with loans they can't pay back. | ||
| They never see that job that was promised to them. | ||
| But they've got one last place to turn to to try to get their lives back on track. | ||
| I've met a lot of these students. | ||
| Have you met any of them? | ||
| I have. | ||
| I have seen their stories and heard their stories from them living in their parents' basement because of student loan debt and no college diploma or a worthless one from some for-profit colleges and universities. | ||
| You have a department within the Department of Education for borrower defense. | ||
| Are you familiar with that? | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| Can you tell me what you understand the borrower defense law to promise? | ||
| Well, first of all, I'd like to address how we started the conversation, not the percentages. | ||
| But this is an issue, sir, that is, I think you well know, is not just relative to for-profit universities. | ||
| We have many of our universities today that are promising degrees and jobs which are not being fulfilled, even those from very prestigious and elite universities. | ||
| The cost of college today is so incredibly high that we have many students who were graduating thinking that they were going to have a job that they'd be able to repay their loan. | ||
| But the cost of those loans are so high that even if they get that job, it may not, over the course of their lifetime, be able to repay that loan. | ||
| So one of the things that we have proposed in looking at our FAFSA application forms is providing information even on FAFSA that would indicate to a student who is applying for a student loan, hey, take a look at this. | ||
| This is the college you're going to. | ||
| This is the job that you want, and this is about how much money this job can pay. | ||
| And is this college the right place for you? | ||
| Are these courses the right place for you to take? | ||
| So let's give upfront a little more information so that they actually have an understanding of what their opportunity in the marketplace can be. | ||
| Thank you, Madam Secretary. | ||
| I want to reclaim my time since it's very limited. | ||
| The point that I'm making is there is one brand of college and university that is particularly egregious when it comes to deceiving these students. | ||
| It's for-profit colleges and universities. | ||
| 8% of high school grads, 30% of student loan defaults in that category alone, it stands out from all the rest. | ||
| The point I'm getting to is you're hollowing out the borrower defense agency within your own department. | ||
| This is supposed to be the rescue for these students to finally get back on track and maybe go to a good school one way or the other. | ||
| Why would you hollow out the resources there and the people that are enforcing the borrower defense rule when we have these terrible numbers of exploitation of students? | ||
| Well, and my point is that we shouldn't just focus on those schools. | ||
| I do know that I totally agree with you. | ||
| There are some scam universities out there. | ||
| Why would you hollow out the people who are supposed to enforce it? | ||
| Because I think we're putting other measures in place, but the scam. | ||
| Give me an idea what you're putting in place that's better than the borrower defense rule. | ||
| Well, we just talked a little bit about FAFSA. | ||
| It's the education up front. | ||
| I'm talking about the victims, the ones who are already victims. | ||
| They're in debt by tens of thousands of dollars. | ||
| They're living in their parents' basement. | ||
| They have no place to turn. | ||
| And you're telling me the FAFSA form application is going to help them. | ||
| How can it help them? | ||
| And that's not in place yet, but I think that's going to be very, very helpful. | ||
| Here's the other thing. | ||
| Where are our guidance counselors in high schools? | ||
| Who are they talking to? | ||
| And I think that they need to be able to do that. | ||
| I think that they need to be poorly informed, and I think they need to look at the cost of education. | ||
| You're cutting the number of counselors in these schools at the same time. | ||
| Well, the counselors that are doing their jobs can provide information to these. | ||
| There aren't enough of them. | ||
| That's the point I'm making. | ||
| And the situation is terrible for these students. | ||
| First-generation students who are being exploited by these schools, they need your protection. | ||
| They need our protection. | ||
| They deserve it. | ||
| They're doing the right thing. | ||
| And unfortunately, you're reducing the number of people to enforce the law. | ||
| I yield, Madam Chair. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Kennedy. | ||
| Madam Secretary, I want to welcome, by the way, I want to ask you about the TRIO program that has been mentioned and its sister program, Gear Up. | ||
| We spend $1.858 billion a year on TRIO. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's $1,580 million a year. | ||
| Is am I math right? | ||
| I think that's right, sir. | ||
| And how long have we been spending $1,580 million a year on this program? | ||
| I'm not sure the total length of time of the program. | ||
| More than 10 years? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So that's over a trillion dollars we've spent on this program. | ||
| And in this program, this trillion dollars we've spent, we give this money, as I appreciate it, to colleges and universities to encourage poor kids to go to college. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| To provide some of those kids who have not yet been exposed to what it takes to get ready to go to college. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| To encourage poor kids to go to college, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And given that we spent a trillion dollars, how many poor kids who otherwise wouldn't have gone to college have gone to college and graduated? | ||
| A significant number, I would imagine. | ||
| How many? | ||
| I don't know exactly. | ||
| Isn't that a question we should ask? | ||
| I think so, and I'd be happy to get back to you with that answer. | ||
| You know, the other thing about this. | ||
| But wait, Madam Secretary, I'm not fussing at you. | ||
| Do we have that number? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| We don't have it. | ||
| I don't think so because there is the. | ||
| Well, if we were, so we've spent a trillion dollars and we've given this money to universities and they're supposed to encourage poor kids to go to college, but we don't know how many poor kids went to college who otherwise wouldn't have gone to college and graduated, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Well, what do your audits show? | ||
| Well, that's the issue. | ||
| And I mentioned it when I was. | ||
| Are you able to audit? | ||
| We're not. | ||
| We're not able to audit, and there are constraints against the TRIO program for its accountability. | ||
| The other issue with. | ||
| Well, but I'm sorry to cut you off, but I don't have much time. | ||
| So we spent a trillion bucks. | ||
| We gave it to the colleges. | ||
| We said encourage poor kids to go to college. | ||
| We don't know how many kids went to college because you don't have the authority to audit. | ||
| How do you know these universities are not just using the money to operate instead of encouraging poor kids to go to college? | ||
|
Regulatory Burden Relief
00:14:28
|
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| I'm not sure. | ||
| You don't know how? | ||
| Because you can't audit. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| You understand hope is not a strategy. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I mean, if you told the average American, we just spent a trillion dollars of your money and we gave it to colleges and universities and we said encourage poor kids to go to college, but we don't know how many kids went to college who otherwise wouldn't have gone and who graduated. | ||
| You understand the average American would ask us what planet we just parachuted in from, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You know, Senator, if I may, there's one other issue on the TRIO program. | ||
| What we have found. | ||
| I'm going to run out of time. | ||
| Take your time back then. | ||
| Let me ask you a question about our skirmish with Harvard. | ||
| And I don't want to get under the merits. | ||
| President Trump has said that Harvard is violating federal law and he's withholding their money. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| And Harvard has responded, we've never violated federal law, but if we did, we give you a pinky promise that we won't do it again. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then President Trump said, okay. | ||
| No offense, but, you know, I just want to be sure. | ||
| So why doesn't Harvard, I will give Harvard the authority to appoint a monitor, pick a monitor, pick whomever they want. | ||
| The federal government has the right to veto the pick. | ||
| So if they pick their brother-in-law, that wouldn't be fair. | ||
| And Harvard has said, no, you just have to trust us. | ||
| You have to accept their pinky promise. | ||
| Is that basically what's going on? | ||
| Well, and not only that, but Harvard did respond to our request for negotiations with a lawsuit. | ||
| Well, but we're in the throat of mitigation. | ||
| If Harvard would just agree to a monitor, that would solve the problem, wouldn't it? | ||
| Might serve part of it. | ||
| The provost is what, vice provost, that we've asked that would come on to be one of the monitors on that situation. | ||
| I'm way over. | ||
| I'm sorry, Madam Chair. | ||
| Senator Reed. | ||
| Well, thanks very much. | ||
| Welcome, Madam Secretary. | ||
| I'm not a great mathematician, but I think you were talking about a trillion dollars. | ||
| I believe $1.5 billion times $10 is $15 billion. | ||
| That's a little bit off from a trillion dollars. | ||
| I think the budget cuts $1.2 billion from $1.2. | ||
| That would be $12 billion, not a trillion dollars. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Why aren't you recommending an audit for the TRIO program if that's what the problem is? | ||
| I'm not allowed to audit it. | ||
| Legislatively, you could propose that. | ||
| We could propose it, which is what I had said at the very beginning. | ||
| I would look forward. | ||
| I would look forward. | ||
| You are not proposing the audit. | ||
| You are proposing to essentially constrain the program, put it into a block grant, and without any request for audit language, which would come from the United States Senate. | ||
| Well, that's exactly what I would request. | ||
| Well, why don't you go back to the presentation? | ||
| If the program goes first. | ||
| Yes, I would like to do that. | ||
| If Congress is going to appropriate again money for the TRIO programs, then I would like to work with Congress, and part of that would be auditing. | ||
| We've found that about 92 percent of the trio funds go to the same people all of the time, the same institutions. | ||
| That could indeed imply an audit necessary, but it doesn't validate the budgetary approach you're taking. | ||
| You are taking basically many programs, combining them into from $8 billion total to $2 billion to a block grant. | ||
| Now, in Washington, the block grant is the slow path to extinction because next year the request will be for probably $8 billion. | ||
| And four or five years from now, when the request is still $8 billion, the cost will far exceed that. | ||
| That's sort of budgeting 101. | ||
| So you're really out to eliminate these programs, I think, not to make them more efficient. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| I disagree with that. | ||
| There are some budget cuts, but what we are asking for is a simplified funding measure, which will be a single grant funding to the States for them to use in the best way possible to make sure their education is working better. | ||
| However, the other side of that, if I may, sir, is that we are reducing the regulatory burden. | ||
| Do you know that 47 cents of every dollar that goes into a school teachers spend complying with regulations? | ||
| So if we can take away that regulatory burden, yes, while there are some cuts in the cost of funding, we still give the opportunity to have more dollars because we are reducing the regulatory burden. | ||
| But let me understand this. | ||
| You are very enthusiastic about an audit, but the regulatory burden is so crippling. | ||
| An audit would impose more requirements on the schools. | ||
| I just think you are coming and going, and we are not making progress. | ||
| The cut to these programs is profound. | ||
| $6 billion. | ||
| And the States are not going to step up and say, we can do this. | ||
| I will tell you why. | ||
| Because if this budget passed, every State in this country is going to make a difficult decision. | ||
| Do I save my health care system or do I save my public education system? | ||
| Many of them can't do both. | ||
| And this will be a profound shock to the education systems around the country. | ||
| in one year, a loss of these funds, and to the students that need it. | ||
| Well, what we have found, sir... | ||
| Have you ever taken public assistance? | ||
| Have I ever taken public assistance? | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| No? | ||
| Not at all? | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| Well, many people do. | ||
| And they need that support to get ahead. | ||
| And education is a key mechanism to go ahead. | ||
| I'm over my time. | ||
| To get ahead, and it's remarkable. | ||
| I think this all sort of started with the GI Bill, when a generation of Americans got the education who never could get before. | ||
| And then Senator Pell, my colleague, sort of saw that model and increased it. | ||
| By the way, you are also decreasing the Pell Grants. | ||
| You are shrinking educational opportunity in the United States for a whole generation and more, and also shrinking our ability to compete internationally and globally, because I don't think the Chinese will slack off in their investments in education. | ||
| Senator, I appreciate your comments. | ||
| However, we have spent $3 trillion since 1980 on education in our country when this department was set up, and our scores have continued to go down. | ||
| We are not doing something right. | ||
| And your numbers are a little bit off on a number. | ||
| We are going to have about, it is still a cut, but it is about a $4.5 billion cut, not $8 billion cut. | ||
| Well, it is a significant cut. | ||
| To be more responsible. | ||
| To be more responsible, your responsibility amounts to just surrendering. | ||
| Sorry, sir? | ||
| Surrendering. | ||
| We have this crisis in education, in literacy, all these factors. | ||
| What we are going to do is pull back, let the States do it. | ||
| No, we will spend it more responsibly. | ||
| I doubt it very seriously. | ||
| Let's hope we do. | ||
| Well, hope, as someone said, is not a plan. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, Senator Britt. | ||
| Madam Secretary, thank you so much for being here today. | ||
| I want to start with talking about HBCUs. | ||
| So Alabama has more HBCUs than any other state in the nation. | ||
| We are proud of the work that is done on those campuses. | ||
| We know that it helps strengthen student experience, our workforce, our communities, and our future. | ||
| So if you look across Coast to Coast, there are about 285,000 individuals that are attending HBCUs, and the Strengthening HBCU program has about $300 million annually allocated to supporting the operations and student services and academic infrastructure. | ||
| So can you walk us through in the President's FY26 budget, kind of what you have put in place to continuing to make sure that our HBCUs can thrive and provide that educational opportunity for so many students that otherwise wouldn't have it? | ||
| Well, in a word or in a very short sentence, we are continuing the education support and the budget support that have been for HBCUs. | ||
| It's one of the promises that the President made, and that's exactly what we're going to continue to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| And will you make sure that there are guardrails put up to whether it's assistance for grant administration or technical assistance that those remain in place? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Excellent. | ||
| That's very important. | ||
| So you just mentioned that when this department was founded, you said since 1980, we've had about spent about $3 trillion, but yet student scores have not improved. | ||
| One of the reasons I ran for the Senate is I want the unseen to be seen. | ||
| I want to close the gap between the have and have-nots, and that is why I am so excited and thrilled about your support and commitment to educational freedom and opportunity. | ||
| When you look at a state like Alabama, we have the Alabama Accountability Act, and we are working to help families better have access to educational opportunities through scholarship tuition and tax credits. | ||
| But we know that the demand is, it far outpaces the actual supply. | ||
| So in your FY26 budget for charter school programs, you've taken it to $500 million, which is a $60 million increase. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My question to you is, can you walk us through how these funds will be used to expand options, particularly in rural communities and underserved communities? | ||
| So when we work to close that gap, these parents have an opportunity and a choice for their child. | ||
| Well, thank you very much, Senator Britt. | ||
| It's very important to the President that all students have access, equal access to a quality education. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And one of the things that he has said time after time is that no child should be trapped in a failing school, which is one of the reasons why he wanted to expand the amount of dollars for charter schools. | ||
| And I have visited several charter schools and public schools too already around the country. | ||
| We can see how innovative that they are being, how creative they are being, you know, with their curriculum, with their content. | ||
| They are, in most instances, they are outperforming the public schools in that area, in which when I talked to Governor Reynolds, I said, you know, there's always concern. | ||
| You have charter schools or freedom of, you know, or choice for schools that public schools will go down. | ||
| And she said, it's just the opposite. | ||
| And Iowa, she said, our public school levels are coming up. | ||
| The competition is really great. | ||
| Parents are more involved, and that's one of the requirements. | ||
| Parents are understanding more that they need to be part of the school board or help to elect the school board members. | ||
| They're attending the meetings, more conferences with teachers, understanding what it is that their child needs in their community to be successful to go on for their education. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I am a public school kid, and I am really proud of that. | ||
| So am I. | ||
| And I want to make sure that where we have children who are trapped in a failing school, that they have an option and an opportunity and a pathway forward because education is the great equalizer. | ||
| As our colleague Tim Scott always says, it is the closest thing to magic that we have in America. | ||
| So, thank you so much for continuing to be committed to making sure that every child has that opportunity to thrive and grow. | ||
| Last, in my last minute, I want to talk to you a little bit about literacy. | ||
| Thank you for your commitment to that. | ||
| I want to understand kind of what your vision is, and I also want to add Alabama to the list of success stories. | ||
| So, we passed in 2019 the Alabama Literacy Act. | ||
| Since that time period, we have seen significant growth in our numbers and proficiency amongst our third and fourth graders. | ||
| For instance, Alabama's national ranking for fourth-grade reading improved from 49th in the nation when we actually, that the year that we put this into place, five years later, we've moved up to 34. | ||
| We believe with intentionality and evidence-based reading instruction and early intervention, you can make a difference that changes a child's pathway forward and opportunity that will be in front of them. | ||
| So, just want to talk a little bit about that. | ||
| If you can tell me what your plans are there and how we can continue to support great work that's being done in states like Alabama. | ||
| Well, evidence-based literacy is number one on my priority list. | ||
| And I want to make sure that we are providing the information and the tools to states for them to see the success that other states have had. | ||
| I mean, other governors, just like you said, in Alabama, have put in place kind of a return to basics or that science of reading, and they have seen incredible results. | ||
| And that's what I want to continue to see across the country. | ||
| We saw a nine-point tick-up between 2003 and 2000, I mean, 2023 and 2024. | ||
| Obviously, we have a ways to go, and we're going to continue to be committed to that. | ||
| But thank you for your commitment to making sure these programs thrive. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Shaheen. | ||
| Thank you, Madam Chair. | ||
| Welcome, Secretary McMahon. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| In your testimony, you said that your goal is to make education better, fairer, and more accountable. | ||
| I think that's something that everyone on this committee could agree with. | ||
| It's one of the reasons I support the TRIO programs. | ||
| And I would like to align myself with the statements of Chair Capito and Chair Collins. | ||
| And I can tell you that in New Hampshire, for the 2024 and 2025 school year, we had 1,468 students who were served by Upward Band, of which 96% graduated from the United States. | ||
|
Law and Order Talks
00:04:16
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|
unidentified
|
We'll leave this recorded program here. | |
| You can finish watching it, though, if you go to our website, cspam.org. | ||
| now to remarks from president trump are you prepared to invoke the insurrection act depends on whether or not there's an insurrection no no but you have violent people and we're not going to let him get away with it Do you think if Democrats continue to side with illegal aliens over law enforcement, that they'll ever be able to win a national election again? | ||
| I love this guy. | ||
| I think that is the question. | ||
| Who you with? | ||
| Clay Barton is great. | ||
| It's a great group, right? | ||
| Barton. | ||
| Great group. | ||
| I think that you're going to see some very strong law and order. | ||
| And Foster, CNN's cleanup, suggesting that this wasn't a real riot in Los Angeles. | ||
| Is that what she said? | ||
| Oh, I think it was a riot. | ||
| I think it was very bad. | ||
| It was covered, really, as a riot by almost everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is the purpose of your meetings and campaigns in the next 24 hours? | |
| Welcome up to Camp David. | ||
| We have meetings with various people about very major subjects. | ||
| Now, we thought we'd do it at Camp David because probably better security there than any place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll be meeting with a lot of people, including generals, as you know, and admirals. | |
| But we'll be meeting with military people and others. | ||
| Everybody, any foreign visitors at Camp David. | ||
| Even if you don't plan to invoke the Insurrection Act, do you plan to send troops to Los Angeles? | ||
| What? | ||
| Even if you're not planning to invoke NAC Insurrection Act, you still plan to send troops? | ||
| Well, we're going to have troops everywhere. | ||
| We're not going to let this happen to our country. | ||
| We're not going to let our country be torn apart like it was under Biden and his autopen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the bar for sending Marines this? | |
| The bar is what I think it is. | ||
| I mean, if we see danger to our country and to our citizens, then we'll be very, very strong in terms of law and order. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's about law and order. | |
| We've got to see what we need. | ||
| We'll send whatever we need to make sure this law and order. | ||
| You first see those protests spreading to other cities, Chicago, New York, for example, in the next few days. | ||
| We're going to be watching it very closely. | ||
| And when they spit at people, you know, they spit. | ||
| That's their new thing. | ||
| They spit at worse. | ||
| You know what they throw at them, right? | ||
| And when that happens, I have a little statement. | ||
| They say, they spit, we hit. | ||
| And I told them, nobody's going to spit on our police officers. | ||
| Nobody's going to spit on our military. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which they do as a common thing. | |
| They get up to them this far away and then they start spitting in their face. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That happens. | |
| They get hit very hard. | ||
| What are the rules to be gay for federal troops? | ||
| We'll see what happens. | ||
| If we think there's a serious insurrection or less than that, we're going to have law and order. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very important. | |
| How would you define an insurrection? | ||
| You have to really just have to look at the site. | ||
| You have to see what's happening. | ||
| Last night in Los Angeles, we watched it very closely. | ||
| There was a lot of violence there. | ||
| There was a lot of violence that it could have gotten much worse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you have an incompetent governor. | |
| Just take a look at the train stations that he's building. | ||
| Like 20 times over budget. | ||
| Nobody's ever seen anything like it. | ||
| So I did call him the other night. | ||
| I said, look, you got to take care of this. | ||
| Otherwise, I'm sending in the troops. | ||
| That's what we did. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Do you have a question for Marco? | ||
| Question for Marco? | ||
| Here's the California Bitcoin State federal target that they stand in the way of the deportation. | ||
| The people stand in the way of law and order, yeah, they will face charges. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
Definition of Insanity
00:03:37
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|
unidentified
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You've been watching live coverage. | |
| We return now to our scheduled program. | ||
| We join it in progress. | ||
| Well, as I understand that, and I'd like to get back to you on that. | ||
| That would be helpful because, as I understand, the president's budget would eliminate this successful program that provides help with systemic, the National Center for Systemic Improvement. | ||
| Okay, let me get back to you on that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Senator Mullen. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman. | ||
| Madam Chair, what's the definition of insanity? | ||
| Of sanity or insanity? | ||
| Insanity. | ||
| Insanity? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what was we ranked in reading and math in 1979? | ||
| I'm sorry, what? | ||
| What was we ranked nationally in math and reading in 1979? | ||
| We were very, very low on the totem pole. | ||
| We're number one in 1979. | ||
| Today, 1979. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| In 1979, we were ranked number one around the world. | ||
| Today, in reading, we are ranked 36th. | ||
| In mathematics, we're ranked 28th. | ||
| It's not working. | ||
| What we're doing is not working. | ||
| We're throwing money at the problem today. | ||
| We have $1.6 trillion out in student loans. | ||
| We have 50% of the $1.6 trillion, which is 42.7 million borrowers that are current, only 50%. | ||
| 30% is either deferred or in default, and 20% are just gone. | ||
| Here's what's scary: the biggest growing population that's defaulting on their loans is 50-year-olds plus. | ||
| It's a problem. | ||
| It's a huge, huge problem. | ||
| So my colleagues want to complain about you making changes. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Because we're wasting taxpayer dollars and it's not paying a dividend back, which is the definition of insanity doing the same thing, expecting different results. | ||
| We deserve better. | ||
| Our kids deserve better. | ||
| Our taxpayers deserve better. | ||
| And we have to make changes. | ||
| So thank you to yourself and to President Trump, who's got the backbone to say, hey, let's make some changes. | ||
| Can you explain how the budget reduces wasteful spending and ensures taxpayer dollars are used efficiently? | ||
| Well, I do believe that as we have combined a lot of our competitive grant programs to a simplified funding measure, so we have cut the total amount. | ||
| However, as I was mentioning earlier, the amount that is going into the states will be in a, some states call it a block grant or a single allocation to that state. | ||
| And it will be controlled by those closest to the child. | ||
|
Funding Backlog Concerns
00:15:42
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| It will be the governor or it will be the state superintendent or it will be parents and teachers, making sure those dollars are maximized within the state. | ||
| There are a lot of programs, some successful, but not all of them, that have been just awarded. | ||
| You know, it's a little bit like Mission Creep. | ||
| You know, you start a department, you start programs, and suddenly we have 264 different programs in the Department of Education that we're trying to fund and get to these states with not fully having an overall understanding of how well they are doing. | ||
| So I believe that by consolidating them and put them in a single grant that will go to the states, they can best spend that money if they need more mental health, if they need an area of concern that's in their state, they know where to send that money much better than the bureaucracy in Washington. | ||
| So we're cutting regulation, but at the same time, you know, we're cutting some of the spending, but we're also cutting regulation to help pay for that. | ||
| Well, so that kind of leads to my other questions of what steps are you taking to reduce bureaucracy and streamline the department's operations, which I do appreciate that because my mother was a special ed teacher. | ||
| My brother-in-law is currently the principal at Guthrie High School. | ||
| My aunt retired as a special ed teacher. | ||
| My two sisters went to school for a special ed. | ||
| And it is frustrating for them to sit in the classroom and not be able to actually meet the students' needs, but have to meet to a testing standard that these students with special needs can never achieve. | ||
| As my mom used to say when she was teaching back in the 70s, that she taught these kids how to try to live on their own, how to just simply take care of themselves through hygiene, how to actually be able to understand their finances to some degree, to be able to wash their clothes, to be able to maybe cook a meal. | ||
| And we hate to take it down that far, but at some point, these kids are going to be out of high school and taking a test isn't their future. | ||
| They're taking their tests, learning how to depend on themselves to some degree to the most they can to live the fullest life of their potential. | ||
| And not having the resources to be able to do that in these schools are tough. | ||
| And so the bureaucracy affects that. | ||
| And by the way, it affects the entire school, too. | ||
| And so by cutting that red tape, you're helping the teachers. | ||
| And the teachers are the one that's desperately crying out for help. | ||
| They went to school to be educators. | ||
| Let them teach. | ||
| Because they can do a phenomenal job. | ||
| They have a heart to do something that I don't. | ||
| I tell people all the time I don't have the patience to be a teacher. | ||
| But those that do, I want to give them all the help they can without having to worry about the red tape and the bureaucracy along the way. | ||
| So I appreciate you pushing this from Washington, D.C. and letting the classroom make this decision for themselves. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| We've been joined by the Vice Chair, so I'll call on Vice Chair Murray for her questions. | ||
| Thank you very much, Chair Capito. | ||
| Good morning, Secretary McMahon. | ||
| You know, President Trump has made clear that he wants to abolish the very department that you lead, and we know here that you cannot eliminate the Department of Education without an act of Congress. | ||
| But I'm afraid that that has not stopped you from preventing the department from actually doing its job. | ||
| You have indiscriminately shuttered offices and pushed out half of the department's staff. | ||
| And under your leadership, we have seen critical research to improve student outcomes axed overnight and funding for mental health services and teacher training, among a whole lot, abruptly cut off and discontinued. | ||
| Now, today you come before this committee to request massive funding cuts that do, in my opinion, nothing to help improve opportunities for students in our public schools throughout the country. | ||
| You are proposing to slash Pell Grants and much more. | ||
| Now, you and the President say this isn't about cutting education funding, but all about, quote, returning education to the States. | ||
| But actually, that can be further from the truth because the reality is this administration is actually taking unprecedented steps to extort schools and universities and hold Federal funding hostage if they don't conform with your agenda. | ||
| So it's pretty clear that returning education to the States actually means letting states and colleges and local communities pick up the tab. | ||
| And I just don't believe that's how things should work in America. | ||
| I don't believe that's good for students, and I don't believe it's good for our families. | ||
| Now, having said that, Secretary McMahon, as I mentioned, you have set out to eliminate nearly half of your department's workforce, and that includes pushing out the door more than half of the staff at the Office for Civil Rights, the entire staff responsible for managing grant operations and contract procurement, and employees who actually prevent students from getting ripped off by predatory colleges. | ||
| The department cannot do its basic job to execute the law given how many staff have been pushed out, and it is our students and our teachers who will suffer the consequences. | ||
| So I want to know from you, before you cut that much staff, did you conduct any analysis to assess whether or not it would degrade support and services for students in our schools or how the department would still be able to execute the law after losing so many employees? | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| Excuse me, good morning. | ||
| Thank you for that. | ||
| Yes, we did talk to the department itself. | ||
| Did you do an actual analysis? | ||
| OCR. | ||
| What we looked at across was how can we restructure the department so that we can maximize the use of the people who are there? | ||
| So what we did was in like training manuals and things of that nature to look at it and say, okay, we can better operate if we focus on students. | ||
| So this was a conversation. | ||
| And you didn't do an actual analysis to determine what the effects of this would be? | ||
| No. | ||
| So no study was done. | ||
| They were just fired, and you assumed that it would work? | ||
| No, obviously not. | ||
| I have been in the private sector and done restructuring before in companies, and it is painful to do. | ||
| It is painful. | ||
| But normally companies look ahead and say, what are our goals and what will be the impact if these employees are gone from this department? | ||
| That's why I asked, but you have not done an analysis and my time is short, so let me continue. | ||
| I know Ranking Member Baldwin talked with you about this as well. | ||
| You were required by law to submit an operating plan 45 days after enactment of the full year CR detailing exactly how you are spending funding Congress provided this year. | ||
| You didn't do that. | ||
| The purported operating plan that you did submit told us virtually nothing about how you are spending taxpayer dollars right now at this very moment. | ||
| And that really raises concerns about when and actually if you are going to get funding that Congress did provide for FY25 out the door. | ||
| For example, your FY26 budget request zeroes out dedicated funding for literacy education programs, and your operating plan for this year describes this funding as unallocated. | ||
| So will you allocate the $220 million for literacy programs that Congress appropriated for FY25? | ||
| Well, Senator, as I mentioned earlier, we are looking at the unallocated dollars now to determine which of those programs we can best spend those dollars on. | ||
| And I will be happy to get back to you. | ||
| And we want to work with Congress on those unallocated dollars to see where they could be spent the best. | ||
| Well, what is your plan to make sure that that funding actually gets to the schools and students it was intended to support? | ||
| We are running out of time here. | ||
| Well, to look at those programs and then to allocate them to the States, if those programs we believe is the best interest. | ||
| Those funds were appropriated by Congress. | ||
| Your department was to allocate them, and it really looks to me like the department is illegally impounding funding that would help our students succeed with plans that don't exist and just day after day going by here, and that is our concern. | ||
| Well, let us work more with you as we update those allocations, as we did before. | ||
| When do you plan to have those funds out by? | ||
| Well, the funds that we are approving will go out in this year. | ||
| Like in this next month or the fiscal year? | ||
| You are running out of time, so we need to see what the plan is. | ||
| If you could provide that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Secretary McMahon, the administration says that one of its priorities is tackling anti-Semitism in our schools. | ||
| That is correct, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Well, the Office of Civil Rights at your department takes the leading role in preventing anti-Semitism and enforcing our Nation's civil rights law. | ||
| It is really an important mission. | ||
| But as you hopefully know, that office is underwater. | ||
| What is the current backlog at OCR? | ||
| Can you tell us that? | ||
| Well, we inherited about a 20,000 backload from the Biden administration. | ||
| But one of the things that we found is some of those cases were like one-page complaints, and we have really been able to get rid of many of them. | ||
| And we are fulfilling. | ||
| This is important for me to finish. | ||
| We absolutely are fulfilling all of our statutory requirements, have not failed to do any of those. | ||
| And not only are we reducing the backload, but we are keeping up with what is coming with a reduced staff because we are doing it efficiently. | ||
| If you don't have the staff, you can't do them. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| If you have an efficient staff that has changed programs and you are addressing all my questions, then you are being successful. | ||
| So I am answering your question by Madam Secretary. | ||
| My question is, what is the current backlog? | ||
| The current backlog is probably about, let's see, I am looking at my numbers now, about 2,500 cases. | ||
| 2,500. | ||
| And how many are you processing per month? | ||
| Do you have any sense? | ||
| Well, we're catching up with the backlog and keeping current on the ones that are coming in. | ||
| But you don't know how many you're processing every month. | ||
| You can't tell us so we can get back to you. | ||
| I can get back to you with that. | ||
| Would you exactly? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you could commit to giving us quarterly reports so we know whether OCR is simply dismissing these cases or doing its job. | ||
| If you could give us a quarterly report. | ||
| I'd be happy to do that. | ||
| I can assure you it's doing its job. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you, Madam Chair. | ||
| Senator Hudsmith. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Madam Chairman, and thank you, Madam Secretary, for being here. | |
| And I applaud you for your courage to make changes and the efficiency that is so needed that you're addressing that. | ||
| You know, we've talked a lot about Pell Grants for short-term courses. | ||
| And I got here in 2018. | ||
| We were talking about it then. | ||
| We continue to talk about it today. | ||
| Can you just kind of expand a timeline of what you're looking at for allowing the Pell Grants or getting us to the position that Pell Grants can cover short-term courses? | ||
| Well, we'd like to do that right away. | ||
| And I think as we are looking in the new budget, we'd like to see those short-term Pell Grants be part of that budget. | ||
| Because I do think that that is one of the best ways that we can get students into the economy and working right away. | ||
| We had a little brief conversation about that before you joined. | ||
| And it's one of the things that I've talked about for a long time since back 2009 and 2010. | ||
| When I actually ran for the Senate in Connecticut, I was talking about those same things, that we needed a skilled workforce in our country because we are not fulfilling those needs and those requirements. | ||
| And short-term Pell Grants will actually get people into the marketplace quicker. | ||
| They are cheaper. | ||
| They can be, you know, we are hoping they could be six to eight weeks. | ||
| It's not the full term of a community college. | ||
| And we can get them earning a living. | ||
| And we are hopeful that within the next one to two years, do you think that's a practical timeframe? | ||
| I would hope it would be before that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| That's what I'm hoping for as well. | ||
| And hoping, you know, working with Congress to make sure that that happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And we've always talked about administration's wish for workforce-aligned apprenticeship-focused learning as well. | ||
| And that is just so aligned with career and technical education training that's so important in my state. | ||
| And I know many states. | ||
| But the initiatives happening in Mississippi, this is really important. | ||
| And we're thrilled that as Senator Britt was talking about Alabama, we had the Mississippi miracle that, you know, we were 49th at one time in fourth grade reading. | ||
| We are in the top 20 now. | ||
| So it just shows that if you're intentional about something, you can accomplish it. | ||
| And you did it at the state level without the interference of the federal government. | ||
| We did it at the state level because we were intentional about doing it. | ||
| But as such, career and technical grants are especially important to me and my constituents. | ||
| Please provide us the details about the Department of Education's proposed FY26 budget for these career and technical programs. | ||
| Well, really, you know, we are looking very much across all states, and we are level funding CTE. | ||
| It's not being reduced, you know, in the current 26 budget. | ||
| And I think, you know, it's really, the President has charged us to work with commerce and labor and all the different departments. | ||
| We have about 43 different workforce development programs across government, and it's incredibly inefficient. | ||
| So we would like to narrow that scope and work with different departments and find out exactly what we can do. | ||
| And I think, you know, Senator, you referenced about going with the Department of Labor. | ||
| Those are conversations that are being held because can we be more efficient working across different departments? | ||
| And that's what we really want to do and what we want to accomplish. | ||
| And let's go, let's talk about EIR grants, the education, innovation, and research grants that are critical for boosting achievements in these high-need students. | ||
| But Mississippi has received no grants from 2021 to 2024, despite the state facing challenges of medium incomes, low-medium incomes, high-rule student enrollment, and the teacher shortage that we're facing. | ||
| In fact, no EIR grants were awarded to nearly two-thirds of the states represented by Republicans on the Senate Appropriations Committee. | ||
| But California, New York, and Massachusetts awarded 49 separate EIR grants, totaling more than $300 million. | ||
| But I just feel it's important to note that there are no limits on indirect costs imposed by these grants. | ||
| And do you agree that the EIR funds need to be reformed to optimize their program's impact so that direct resources are sent to the areas of greatest need? | ||
| Yeah, I'd like to work with you and get back to you on that. | ||
| I'm not familiar specifically with what happened in Mississippi, but I would like to get back to you and work with you on that program. | ||
| Yeah, we know a specific that applied that, so it's not like we're not applying. | ||
| We're definitely applying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the competitive grant process. | ||
|
Crisis in Connecticut
00:07:31
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|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| But zero, absolutely zero of that. | ||
| Okay, I'm out of my time, but thank you for everything you're doing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Murphy. | ||
| Thank you, Madam Chairman. | ||
| Thank you to both of you for being here today. | ||
| A few years ago, we worked really hard across the aisle to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a bill that made changes in our gun laws, but in large part because it was a real priority for my Republican colleagues, also included billions of dollars in funding for school-based and children's mental health. | ||
| Earlier this year, you did something extraordinary. | ||
| You canceled a billion dollars worth of existing ongoing grants to schools all across the country. | ||
| And it's extraordinary because you didn't cut off new grants, you cut off existing grants. | ||
| So in states all across the nation, blue and red, there are now mental health programs for kids that are shutting down. | ||
| And kids who have been relying on really important adults in their life, these counselors and social workers, are losing access. | ||
| You know Connecticut very well. | ||
| You shut off a program that provides mental health resources to kids in crisis in Northwest Connecticut. | ||
| When they did a survey of these kids and asked the kids who are in this particular program who the one adult was, who they would go to if they were in mental health trouble or in response to a trauma, every single one of those kids in that program named the counselor funded by this program. | ||
| You've shut that grant down. | ||
| When those kids show up to school next fall, that trusted adult will not be there. | ||
| You've told this program, as well as all the other programs, that the reason is they're violating civil rights laws. | ||
| This program has no idea what you mean by that. | ||
| And I guess I just ask you this. | ||
| I'm sure you had to weigh factors in making this decision, but did you worry about what your decision would do to these kids, these kids where you've ripped away their counselors and social workers literally in the middle of the program? | ||
| Do you worry about what's going to happen to those kids in Northwest Connecticut and kids all across the country who have lost access to their trusted adults? | ||
| I certainly worry about mental health for children and adults all across the country. | ||
| I certainly do. | ||
| I guess I'm asking specific, you must have weighed this. | ||
| I assume you weighed this when you made this extraordinary decision to shut down a billion dollars worth of mental health programming for kids. | ||
| Did you worry about what you would do to those specific kids? | ||
| Well, what we have to do, I think, and that's what our simplified funding program is going to do, is to put programs into a single grant that's going to the states to be determined how that money can be best used. | ||
| But how did you weigh the impact? | ||
| I'm asking about this specific decision. | ||
| How did you weigh the impact that, again, these kids in Northwest Connecticut, they literally say, this adult is the most important adult in my life. | ||
| And you decided, you made a decision to shut down that program. | ||
| And this can be replicated all over the country. | ||
| How did you weigh the impact on those kids? | ||
| It's a really cruel thing to do to those kids. | ||
| So did you think about the impact on those kids? | ||
| Well, I certainly can't evaluate every particular program in every school district across the state. | ||
| There are some areas that need mental health more than there are others. | ||
| And there were programs in the mental health program that did deal with DEI and with gender issues, et cetera. | ||
| And it wasn't just about the kind of things that you're talking about. | ||
| So in totality, as we look at mental health grants across the country, we have to make sure that those programs are being used to serve best in those communities. | ||
| So, therefore, a governor or a principal or a state superintendent would have the best information relative to what is needed in that particular state. | ||
| Yeah, we know what we need in Northwest Connecticut, and what we need is for the federal government not to rip funding away from these kids in need in the middle of the service program. | ||
| Or to better allocate the dollars you have and provide those professionals across the state. | ||
| Let me ask you another question. | ||
| Obviously, we're trying to understand what the Department of Education is doing with respect to the threats you've made against institutions of higher education. | ||
| In the letter that you sent to Harvard demanding that they make certain changes, you told them that they had to end all of their diversity programs, but that they had to institute viewpoint diversity. | ||
| That doesn't seem to make sense. | ||
| How do you tell them to end all their diversity programs? | ||
| And we assume that this is a mandate that you will make of other schools as well. | ||
| How do you ask them to end diversity programs while instituting viewpoint diversity? | ||
| Those seems to be totally contradictory. | ||
| No, the diversity programs that we've asked and demanded that be eliminated were the DEI, where those programs actually were pitting one group against another. | ||
| Isn't viewpoint diversity a diversity program? | ||
| A viewpoint diversity is exchange of ideas that's actually better, absolutely. | ||
| Now, here, because Harvard only has 3 percent by its own numbers, 3 percent conservative faculty, do you think they are allowing enough of viewpoint diversity through that teaching? | ||
| Where in the statute does it give you the ability to cut off federal funding for a university based upon your decision, your determination that they don't have viewpoint diversity? | ||
| Can you cite to a statute an authority that Congress has given you to micromanage the viewpoint diversity of a college? | ||
| Well, certainly if well, no, let's back up. | ||
| Well, no, no, no. | ||
| I think that's really important. | ||
| Can you ask you a question? | ||
| Can you cite a statute? | ||
| Because you can't cut off funding for universities unless you have a statutory authorization to do so. | ||
| So what statute gives you the right to tell any university that they have to have a certain mixture of viewpoints? | ||
| So here's what happened with Harvard. | ||
| It's very simple. | ||
| I don't mean to be, I don't mean to provide a being hostile to the state. | ||
| Well, I have to give you some ideas. | ||
| I think you have to cite the statute. | ||
| The statute is Title VI. | ||
| These were civil rights violations. | ||
| That is why we filed a case and defunded or stopped the funding for Waffle Harvard as well as we did Columbia. | ||
| And in that conversation with them, we talked about different things that they should do coming back to the table to make their programming better. | ||
| The President of Columbia absolutely indicated, as well as the President of Harvard, that they needed to do things on their campus to eliminate anti-Semitism. | ||
| That was kind of the crux of what brought us into talking to the different universities. | ||
| And then we sat down with them to say, okay, these are other issues that you need to address on your campus because you do receive federal funding under federal funding if you are breaking the law which they did under Title. | ||
| I don't have any conception of civil rights law to give you the authorization to micromanage viewpoint diversity on campus. | ||
| That's not authorized under the civil rights title provided to you by the United States Congress. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Senator Merkley. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
Blue Collar Grants Canceled
00:08:38
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||
| Greetings. | ||
| Glad to have you before the committee. | ||
| I wanted to turn to TRIO. | ||
| I wanted to echo Senator Collins' support. | ||
| But I know you wanted accountability. | ||
| And you think it would be a good idea to have each grantee have to have benchmarks that they are seeking to address? | ||
| I think that we do need to have better accountability with TRIA, but one of the things that I... | ||
| So having Bench... | ||
| Limited time, but benchmarks up front would be useful to have these programs meet. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Maybe have them do an annual report on meeting those benchmarks? | ||
| Accountabilities, yes, because we don't now have the ability to track that. | ||
| So actually, those benchmarks are set now, and each grantee has to do an annual report. | ||
| Have you read those annual reports? | ||
| I have not read them all. | ||
| But I do not know that. | ||
| I don't know if you're not afraid that they're not following all of the different authors. | ||
| I've also said that if Congress. | ||
| Madam, just let me finish if I can. | ||
| And that is that you said there was no accountability. | ||
| I just pointed out that two of the things you'd like to see, which are benchmarks and annual performance reports, are already done. | ||
| In addition, the Pell Institute published a recent summary of four of the studies the Department of Education did on four of these eight TRIO programs. | ||
| Have you looked at those reports? | ||
| Because they did a thorough evaluation of these programs. | ||
| I have not personally not. | ||
| Well, that bothers me for you to come before us today and say there needs to be accountability, and yet there is accountability. | ||
| And it just seems like a cover story for saying we don't want to help blue-collar kids make it into college. | ||
| And I must tell you, most of my colleagues here, they're not blue-collar kids. | ||
| I am. | ||
| I know how hard it was to make that leap into college. | ||
| I know the difficulty of the culture when you grow up in high school and you never talk to anybody about going to college. | ||
| And you don't understand what that's all about in that world. | ||
| And these TRIO programs have resulted in 6 million students graduating through those programs. | ||
| And you want accountability? | ||
| Well, what did those studies say that have been done by the Department of Education? | ||
| They said upward-bound students twice as likely to earn a bachelor's degree. | ||
| Talent search students, 33% more likely to enroll in college. | ||
| Veterans, upward-bound, 42% more likely. | ||
| I'm going to go on to my next question, but let me just say your argument that there's no studies, no accountability, it's just actually wrong. | ||
| And the fact that you're coming here not even having looked at your own department studies of these programs in order to be informed about them is profoundly troubling. | ||
| Let me turn to the cost of higher education. | ||
| This is also very important to a blue-collar kid. | ||
| Folks in my community today, because I still live in a blue-collar community, they say we're not sure our kids should go to college because they'll end up with a millstone of a mountain of debt and maybe no job. | ||
| And here you are making it more expensive. | ||
| I wonder if you know how much a student in Germany has to pay in tuition for university. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| It's zero. | ||
| What about the broader European economic zone? | ||
| Sir, we don't live in Europe. | ||
| It is zero. | ||
| But my point here is those countries are saying we want every child to thrive. | ||
| We want every child to have opportunity. | ||
| We don't want them to be saying our kids, maybe we should tell them not to go to college because they'll have this mountain of debt. | ||
| And that opportunity, that's American values of opportunity for every individual. | ||
| And here you are raising the costs of college, making it much harder for ordinary kids from blue-collar backgrounds to be able to pursue their dreams. | ||
| And I find that totally inconsistent with Trump's campaign where he said he would fight for ordinary families. | ||
| No, I have to disagree, sir. | ||
| We're not raising the cost of college. | ||
| We are actually, with all of the programs that we want to put in place, we want colleges to reduce their costs. | ||
| Well, actually, these loan programs that you're changing are making it much more expensive for kids to go to college. | ||
| And we've not changed loan programs. | ||
| I'm going to turn to mental health because I'm very concerned about mental health. | ||
| A few years ago, before COVID, when I was in a meeting with student counselors in Eastern Oregon, a very rural area, they said, you know, we're seeing kids come in in our early ages and they're acting out much more than they ever did before. | ||
| And I said, well, is this because, was there a factory that just shut down here or a mill that just shut down or an infusion of new wave of meth? | ||
| And they said, no, those are all, the economy is a factor, drug use is a factor in our community. | ||
| But no, those aren't new. | ||
| And one of the counselors said, this is what's new. | ||
| And they pulled out their cell phone. | ||
| This is what's new. | ||
| Kids are coming in with far less understanding and ability of how to sit in a collaborative environment like a classroom and how to communicate with other children and teachers. | ||
| There is a book that just came out. | ||
| My staff happened to put on my desk this morning. | ||
| So I'm going to ask for Chapter 5 to be put into the record, The Anxious Generation. | ||
| And I was paging through it, and under Chapter 5, it notes that there are four factors in which these cell phones are affecting our children profoundly. | ||
| Social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and screen addiction. | ||
| I'd really encourage you to take a look at this. | ||
| I've been urging the department to seriously look at the issue of how childhood is changing. | ||
| And childhood is changing because of technology in ways that are really compromising the ability of our education enterprise to work well. | ||
| But this brings to my point about why you have canceled mental health grants for our schools. | ||
| We have five schools in Oregon that got grants to have more mental health counselors, and you have canceled them. | ||
| Why have you canceled mental health grants in the middle of an enormously challenging time for our students? | ||
| We've not canceled mental health grants. | ||
| We've said we're not continuing them after this year because we're going to allow those programs to be rebid and to take a different look at them, but they have not been canceled. | ||
| And I couldn't agree with you more about cell phones. | ||
| Governor, there are governors of several states who have said bell to bell, there are not going to be cell phones in the classroom, and they are seeing upticks in their literacy and also in the social interaction. | ||
| So therefore, states have the abilities at very different levels to go ahead and make decisions and to put their policies in place that can be effective. | ||
| Then the five grants that you have canceled that you are unaware of in Oregon, you will restore those five grants? | ||
| We have not canceled, we are not continuing those grants. | ||
| So if you discover that you have actually canceled grants that were already awarded, you will undo those cancellations? | ||
| I would like to get back to you on that. | ||
| I do not believe we have canceled any grants. | ||
| We are not continuing, but we will rebid them. | ||
| Well, you rebid them, meaning you are canceling them, but you will rebid them. | ||
| We are not continuing them. | ||
| We haven't canceled them. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They are continuing. | ||
| Well, I've got five schools that have received letters from you or your department saying their grants, their mental health grants have been canceled. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They worked very hard to apply for those grants. | |
| That they've been canceled, the grants that they have received for their program. | ||
| And I will look into that and get back to you. | ||
| Obviously, when you get a grant, it's for work you're doing from here forward. | ||
| So if not continuing means as of today, we're not funding it, then you canceled the grant. | ||
| No, you can rebid the grant, you can recompete the grant, and you can have different. | ||
| Is that what you're doing? | ||
| You said the grants you got, we're ending them, and we're taking them back, but we're going to re-reconceive. | ||
| I said we are not continuing them after this year. | ||
| We will have a rebidding process to re-look at those grants. | ||
| Well, I strongly encourage you to understand how the changes you're making are hurting ordinary kids across this country who may have aspirations, and those aspirations may not all require going to college, but many of those aspirations can be well served by higher education, and you shouldn't be putting obstacles in their path. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Merkley, if you look, what we're doing has not worked. | ||
| So we're continuing to throw money at things that are not being successful. | ||
| So we are trying to look appropriately at all of our grants and how the Department of Education is operating. | ||
| Madam Chair, I'll just say those programs have been successful. | ||
| If you'd taken the very effort to read the evaluations of the TRIO programs, you wouldn't be here making that argument today. | ||
| All right, let's wrap up Senator Merkley's questioning. | ||
| And I will say this in terms of wrapping up. | ||
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| There have been several questions about these particular grants through the, so the follow-up will be great with individual senators. | ||
| I know you'll do it because you do it with me. | ||
| And so I appreciate your approach. | ||
| Hands-on-thank you approach. | ||
| All right, this will end our hearing today. | ||
| I'd like to thank my fellow committee members for their thoughtful conversation and particular thanks to you, Secretary McMahon. | ||
| For any senator who wishes to ask additional questions, questions for the record will be open until June the 10th. | ||
| The hearing record will remain open until then for members who wish to submit additional materials for the record. | ||
| This subcommittee stands in recess and thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
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Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the pro-peace feminist grassroots organization Code Pink, talks about her life as an activist and the nonviolent disruptive actions taken by Code Pink at congressional hearings and elsewhere to bring attention to their causes. | |
| We don't disrupt every hearing. | ||
| The majority of hearings we go to, we don't disrupt. | ||
| We sit through to learn. | ||
| We use the opportunity to talk to the members of Congress when they're on their way in and when they're on their way out. | ||
| So, you know, when you're there every day, you have developed a relationship not only with some of the members of Congress, but with the officers. | ||
| And some of them are quite nice to us. | ||
| They recognize that we are nonviolent people, that we are passionate about these issues, and that this is part of what a vibrant civil society should look like. | ||
| Some of them don't like us very much and are meaner to us. | ||
| We try to report them when they abuse our rights because, again, we go on this principle. | ||
| It is the people's house. | ||
| They are no better than us. | ||
| They are public servants and they should be listening to what we, the public, want to say. | ||
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Medea Benjamin, tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | |
| You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy. | ||
| From Washington to across the country. | ||
| Coming up Monday morning, Center for American Progress's Bobby Kogan and National Taxpayer Union's Damien Brady discuss potential cuts to the budget found in the White House rescissions package and the one big beautiful bill. | ||
| Then, Joey Garrison of USA Today previews the week ahead at the White House. | ||
| Also, The Hills Emily Brooks examines the week ahead in Congress. | ||
| And Hugo Gurden of the Washington Examiner talks news of the day. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern Monday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| And a count of two balls in one strike. | ||
| And a swing of a base hit left field. | ||
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Tune in Wednesday to C-SPAN's live coverage of the Congressional Baseball Game coming to you from Nationals Park. | |
| Since 1909, this tradition has united Democrats and Republicans on the field for a spirited evening of camaraderie and competition. | ||
| And this is Drilled into Center Field of Base Hit. | ||
| Two runs are going to score. | ||
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Don't miss the historic matchup. | |
| Live coverage starts Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern on the C-SPAN Networks. | ||
| c-span now our free mobile video app or online at c-span.org this show and c-span is one of the few places left in america where you actually have left and right coming together to talk and argue And you guys do a great service in that. | ||
| I love C-SPAN too. | ||
| That's why I'm here today. | ||
| Answer questions all day, every day. | ||
| Sometimes I get to do fun things like go on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN is, I think, one of the very few places that Americans can still go. | ||
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C-SPAN has such a distinguished and honorable and important mandate and mission in this country. | |
| I love this show. | ||
| This is my favorite show to do of all shows because I actually get to hear what the American people care about. | ||
| American people have access to their government in ways that they did not before the cable industry provided C-SPAN access. | ||
| That's why I like to come on C-SPAN is because this is one of the last places where people are actually having conversations, even people who disagree. | ||
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Shows that you can have a television network that can try to be objective. | |
| Thank C-SPAN for all you do. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why this program is so valuable because it does bring people together where dissenting voices are heard, where hard questions are asked, and where people have to answer to them. | ||