Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter From Birmingham Jail

Floor Speech

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Mr. RICKETTS. Madam President, I live in the best place in the world--Nebraska. One of the reasons it is the best place in the world is because of the people and the community that pull together in times of disaster.

We just experienced one of those disasters on Friday. According to the National Weather Service, we had 14 tornadoes. Five of them measured as an EF3. They impacted much of the eastern part of our State. We had 450 homes that were destroyed and many more damaged, millions of dollars in damaged public infrastructure, but thanks to a number of people, Nebraska was able to avoid any fatalities--in fact, had no serious injuries.

I want to thank the people at the National Weather Service and our broadcasters, who helped make sure we got the message out. These occurred on a Friday afternoon. Educators kept kids in schools and kept them sheltered. People got the advanced warning, thanks to our broadcasters, and sought shelter. That is one of the reasons we were able to avoid any serious injuries--Nebraskans knew what to do.

I want all Nebraskans who have been impacted by this to know that my wife Susanne and I continue to keep you in our thoughts and prayers.

Then came the reaction, all of the groups who worked to protect Nebraskans. I want to thank our first responders, especially those in Douglas and Washington Counties, for the work they did. I want to thank the Nebraska State Patrol, the Nebraska National Guard, and the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency. All of those organizations did a fantastic job of responding, as they always do in these disasters.

As Nebraskans always do, when their neighbor needs help, they step up, and we saw it time and time again--neighbors helping neighbors, the lines of people showing up at churches and other points of collection to drop off packages of bottled water, Gatorade, food.

I had a chance to tour some of the neighborhoods that were impacted on Saturday morning and saw all the volunteers who had shown up--the wood chippers out there chipping up the wood, people cleaning up, volunteering, showing up with saws and hammers to be able to help out their neighbors.

There was one house that I went by in particular that the roof had been torn off, and already people were on that roof fixing that damage, and an American flag was flying high at that house. It is the Nebraska way.

We live in such a great place because of the people who respond, and this disaster, like the other disasters we have, is just another shining example of Nebraska's spirit and how we come together to help our neighbors.

My office has been in touch with Governor Pillen's office, and he has declared an emergency, a disaster area. As the Federal delegation pulls together here, we will support Governor Pillen's request and stand by to make sure that any Federal resource that is available goes to help us recover in Nebraska. We will make sure those resources get to the people who need them, and we will recover. That is an example of how communities work, of how government works. FAFSA

Madam President, I now want to talk about an example where government is not working, and it is the FAFSA fiasco. FAFSA stands for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Now, this is what students go through to be able to get student aid to be able to apply to college and then know what that college is going to cost them so they can budget and afford it out. It is an incredibly important program for millions of students across this country every single year.

What I want to do is just talk about how that has become such a disaster because today is national college decision day, and because of the Biden administration's incompetence, it has become national college indecision day, as so many students are left in limbo by the incompetence of the Biden administration, which could not roll out a new FAFSA form for students to use and get the information to colleges so colleges can make decisions, get the information back to students, and then students could decide where they want to go to school.

Let's just walk through the timeline a little bit. Back in March of last year, the Department of Education said that they were going to have the new form out in December of 2023. Now, normally, this form comes out in October--October 1--so that students can get working on it right away, get the information in, get the information back, apply for school, all that sort of thing. But we knew it was going to be delayed.

Well, then, on November 15, they said: Well, it will be December 31 before we have this form available. So it pushed back to the very end of December. Now, they did get that new form launched--it was a soft launch--on December 30, but immediately students started experiencing problems.

Then what they said is: Well, we are not going to get the information back to universities until we get some information, and it won't be until January. And they did launch the form--full on--January 8. But, of course, they had already experienced glitches on December 30, so they were still experiencing glitches and problems in January.

Well, then, in January, the Department of Education, realizing they had a problem, said: Well, we are not actually going to get the information out and back to be able to process this until the first half of March. And then, in March, they said: Well, students won't really be able to start making corrections to these forms until the second half of April--or the first half of April.

And so, time and time again, the Biden Department of Education kept pushing back their changes because they had an incompetent process to be able to manage this and get this done for students in a timely manner. And that problem is still going on right now. Millions of aid forms had errors and had to be reprocessed.

I have had parents talk to me, and we have had a number of people call in to my office talking about all the problems we have heard from Nebraskans struggling with this. One of my constituents from Ord called us, frustrated, after they tried to apply online several days in a row, only to find the FAFSA website was down.

Another Nebraskan called because there was a deadline for corrections in their FAFSA form, but when they went to make those corrections and went to the form, they saw there was no place on the online form to make those corrections.

And parents told me that there was no one they could contact to be able to ask questions. One parent told me they have two students who are already in college. They had applied, put the forms in again, got rejected twice, but nobody could tell them why. They couldn't get through to anybody to tell them what was going on.

We had another example in Nebraska. This constituent from Geneva contacted us in February because they had questions about the process of a particular State and local branch. They had called FAFSA repeatedly. They rarely got someone in the FAFSA office to answer, and even when they did, the FAFSA staff never had the answer to their questions. This is terrible customer service. It is exactly what is wrong with a massive, unaccountable Federal bureaucracy.

The Federal Government always needs to put the taxpayers first. These are our customers. As a result of these delays, colleges and universities have been forced to consider pushing back their admission deadlines for accepting students to commit. For example, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has extended their enrollment deposit deadline for incoming undergraduates until May 15.

However, not every college and university was able to make that choice. The Biden administration's incompetence has forced some students to make their college decisions and pay a deposit without knowing exactly how much college will cost them. Think about how crazy that is. Would we ever say to somebody: Yeah, why don't you go out and buy that mutual fund, without knowing how much it is going to cost, or: Go out and buy that car, without knowing how much it was going to cost, or: Go out and buy a house, without knowing how much it was going to cost? We wouldn't do that anywhere else. Why are we asking our college students to make that decision about where they are going to go to college without knowing how much financial aid they are going to be able to get to know whether or not it is affordable?

It is absolutely crazy, and it is terrible customer service and another example of the incompetence of the Biden administration to be able to actually do the basic functions of government that we all rely on.

We should do everything we can to make it easier for taxpayers to access and navigate government services. Instead of doing their job on FAFSA, the Biden administration's Education Department has wasted time on unconstitutional student loan bailouts. So their priorities are completely misplaced. Instead of focusing on things that they have to do for millions of students--to deliver good service, to help them get into college--we are talking about forgiving the very loans that they can't deliver in the first place. That is how they are spending their time. This is just unbelievably incompetent.

I support my colleagues' efforts to get to the answers about this FAFSA fiasco and stand by ready to, yet again, force the Biden administration to do its job.

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