Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I do respect the expertise and experience and dedication of my colleague and friend from Tennessee. I especially understand and am grateful for his leadership as the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which has jurisdiction over this legislation. I understand that he is moving toward reform and overhaul of the current system of financial aid and loans that will make it better for students. That is the goal, that it will be ready perhaps sometime early next year.

As we know from our experience in this body, timelines frequently shift and give way. So early next year may turn into later next year or the spring of next year or at some point in time. In the meantime, futures are in the balance--the futures of students in Connecticut and around the country who are trying to plan in their senior year. Their faces and voices are with me and with all of us every day. Their futures are the future of this country.

The House has extended the Perkins Loan Program for 1 year. Why won't the Senate do it? My colleague from Tennessee urges that we simplify the program. Well, let's simplify decisions that are being made right now at the kitchen tables and the living rooms of families across the country and make available this option even as we simplify and reform the program because the failure to do so vastly complicates and confuses the lives of students who are making real-life decisions while we debate. We are, in fact, debating right now a cyber security information sharing act which pertains to the cloud and computing that tWashington, DCakes place in the cloud. We are talking here in the clouds compared to real-life decisions being made by students and their families every day. I am hearing from them. I am hearing from financial aid administrators, for example at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT, who tell me that there is a level of anxiety and angst they have not seen in recent years because of this body's inaction, its failure to continue a program that has worked and worked well for countless students. In fact, in the 2014-2015 school year, institutions in Connecticut disbursed over $20 million through the Perkins Loan Program, using that funding to provide targeted financial aid to support their very neediest students. Low-income students who face a gap in funding and who have to make hard decisions about real dollars and cents need this program not early next year but right now.

The Senate's failure to act, as the House has done, to extend it for 1 year, abrogates its responsibility. In previous years, Quinnipiac, for example, would have been able to offer these students Perkins loans to close the gaps between what financial aid they are receiving and what they need to continue their education. This year, they are telling students: Sorry, no help available.

These students are the future of our country. They are the ones who are going to be doing the computer science that is necessary for our cyber security. They are the intellectual infrastructure of this country. Our failure to invest in them--and this expiration is only one reflection of that failure to invest--is a failure for the entire country.

I received a note from Nicole Deck--a sophomore at the University of New Haven--telling me how she benefitted from the Perkins program. She is pursuing a double major in marine biology and environmental science. She wrote to me saying: ``I appreciate every day that I spend at the University of New Haven thanks to the aid of the Federal Perkins loans.''

She said: ``Receiving money from the Federal Perkins Loan has allowed me to achieve many of my goals and has opened many doors of opportunity.''

The doors of opportunity for Nicole in marine biology and environmental science on the shores of Long Island Sound, where she can put that science to work to help to save Long Island Sound and to help us nationally to preserve our environment, are not only doors of opportunity for her, they are doors of opportunity for our whole country. The failure to extend the Perkins loan program closes those doors.

I met recently with seniors at the New Britain High School. At New Britain High School, these seniors are thinking about where they will be going to school. They are making life-changing and transformative decisions about their futures based on their financial alternatives. When I asked them ``How many of you have, in effect, abandoned the school of your first choice because you couldn't afford it and Federal aid was not available and no scholarships were accessible?'' about half of them raised their hands.

I thought to myself, well, things often work out for the better but sometimes not. Sometimes futures are constrained and warped and distorted because a young person with great potential is unable to develop it because of an avenue of education blocked by financial unaffordability.

My colleagues have stated very powerfully and eloquently and it has been a bipartisan debate about what the Perkins Loan Program means to so many students.

I will close by saying that this program involves an example of real institutional skin in the game. It requires institutional capital contributions as a requirement for a school's participation. It fills the gap of affordability that affects our very neediest and often most deserving students.

Our constituents will rightly ask us: Did you reject the student loan program?

No, we did not reject it.

Did you renew it?

No. We simply allowed it to die.

This program has gone into the cloud. We have allowed this to expire when we could extend it for 1 year without really damaging the reform effort underway.

I want to repeat that I respect the HELP Committee chairman's intention and goal to reform all student loan programs, but in the meantime, futures of American students are affected unfairly and unwisely by the inaction by this body.

I yield the floor.

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