Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Thank you, Ranking Member Van Hollen, for all of your work on this.

Mr. Chair, there are many damaging cuts in this budget, but I would like to speak just a minute about the cuts to education. In ancient civilizations, literacy and education were closed off to all but the very affluent; and the beauty of America, since its founding, has been the democratization of a way to become educated, make your way into the middle class and to do well.

This budget would threaten that, and it does it in several ways. First, it cuts Pell grants, that is, grants to college students, by $145 billion. It also very significantly makes Pell grant aid unavailable to part-time students.

I want to focus on that for just a second because this is something we see over and over in our districts again: single moms or working parents, men or women, who are trying to balance a job and go to school at the same time. They are trying to take two or three classes maybe, make their way, still be able to work to support their families, but also go to college and finish off and slowly get their degree.

This budget would not allow them to access Pell grants. It would make achieving their goal of getting their education, maybe training for another kind of job, impossible for millions of Americans. The cuts to Pell grants are especially significant because in States like mine, in Texas, since 2003, tuition has gone up an average of 104 percent for thousands and thousands of Texans.

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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. So when Republicans put forward a budget that cuts off access to higher education, what they are doing is cutting off a path to the middle class for millions of Americans, and every American, young and old, should be concerned about that.

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