Aderholt Remarks at FY25 Budget Hearing for the Department of Education (As Prepared)

Good morning, Mr. Secretary. I want to welcome you again to our Subcommittee, and I look forward to your testimony today.

When you came before this Subcommittee last year, I and many of my colleagues expressed disbelief with the Department’s proposed Title Nine rule that would force schools to allow biological teen males into girls’ locker rooms and promote unfair competition on the playing field.

The original intent of Title Nine was to protect women, so I hope your Department’s delay in finalizing this misguided rule signals that the Administration agrees with most of America - that this proposal would harm women and girls in sports and set them back decades. I will have more to say about Title Nine in my questioning today.

Turning now to your budget proposal, I am concerned about the new programs, increases, and cuts proposed in your Fiscal Year 2025 budget and what they say about the Department’s priorities.

Twenty-five million dollars for a new preschool demonstration, ten million dollars for an unnecessary initiative for fostering diverse schools, and large increases to administrative accounts to carry out student loan debt transfers funded by new budget gimmicks are just a few of the issues that concern me.

Rather than create more new programs, along with the additional bureaucracy they would require, our education budget needs to focus back on the basics.

Four years after schools were shut down across this country, twenty-six percent of all students are still chronically absent from schools. For the poorest students, that number rises to a staggering thirty-two percent.

Obviously if children are not in school, they are not learning. How would the new proposals in your budget get these kids back into classrooms? How would they address the significant declines in math and reading scores, felt hardest in minority communities? How would they help regain the trust of parents? These are the tough questions the budget needs to address.

I am also puzzled by your Department’s proposal to cut grants to Charter Schools by forty million dollars. This program has been flat funded for five years, but Charter Schools are outperforming traditional public schools in student achievement.

At a time when our nation faces skyrocketing debt and inflation, we should be targeting investments in education in what works. Not towards duplicative, ideological programs that sound nice but make no real difference in learning.

Your budget also proposes a 600 million dollar increase for the office that oversees federal student aid programs, including the Department’s student loan cancellation schemes.

Even though the Supreme Court struck down the president’s signature one-time student loan cancellation program, your Department has doubled down on cancelling loans through other avenues.

In fact, on March 21, your Department boasted that it has cancelled a total of 144 billion dollars in loans so far.

This doesn’t even account for the new loan repayment plan the Department unilaterally created last year, which makes loan repayment even more generous including by cutting borrowers’ payments in half and accelerating loan forgiveness for some borrowers.

Last September, the Congressional Budget Office estimated this repayment program would cost 260 billion dollars over the ten-year budget window.

It is clear that the Department’s student loan forgiveness policies are unfair to Americans who did not go to college or paid back their loans,

and they send a dangerous message to students: borrow more and just send taxpayers the bill.

I also continue to hear about how free speech is under attack on college campuses across the country. Our colleges and universities should be places that support free academic inquiry and where different ideas can be expressed and exchanged.

So, it is alarming to hear about speakers being disinvited or angrily shouted down at events, or about faculty being “canceled” for expressing views that do not conform to popular thinking on campus.

This “cancel culture” is ironically increasing at a time when universities are failing to adequately condemn the rise of antisemitism and support of terrorist organizations at our universities - creating a hostile environment for Jewish students, faculty, and staff. This is unacceptable.

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expressions, more than half – or 56 percent – of students surveyed for their 2024 College Free Speech Rankings report, said they worried about reputational harm because someone misunderstood something they said or did.

Twenty-eight percent of students said they engage in self-censorship “fairly often” or “very often” during class discussions. One in five students said it is not clear their campus administration protects free speech, and 43 percent said it’s only “somewhat” clear that free speech is protected. These statistics are concerning. We can and must do better – both to foster free speech at our college campuses, while also pushing back against terrorist rhetoric that has no place in our schools.

Mr. Secretary, as you can see there are a lot of important topics to talk about today. I want to thank you for coming before us. I turn now to my colleague and friend, the Ranking Member from Connecticut, Ms. DeLauro, for her opening statement.