House FY18 Budget Plan is Recipe for a Weakened Economy and Increased Inequity

The House Budget Committee’s fiscal year 2018 budget resolution lays out a plan more extreme than the deep budget cuts proposed by the Trump Administration, and would force millions of students to borrow more, raise their cost of borrowing, and make it harder to repay their loans. The Budget Committee plan comes at the same time that House appropriators are voting to cut $3.3 billion from Pell Grants in the fiscal year 2018 education appropriations bill. This House agenda is wholly out of step with the fundamental goal of our nation’s federal financial aid system: to help make a quality higher education accessible to all qualified students, regardless of their financial background.