Kpmg Audit

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, I have had enough with the Biden Department of Education's utterly dishonest accounting tricks. The Department of Education's 2022 financial statement doesn't have a leg to stand on.

KPMG, an independent auditor, stated that there were material weaknesses in the department's estimates regarding how much the Biden administration's student loan debt relief plan would cost.

The Biden administration claims that its plan would cost $30 billion annually over 10 years, but this is assuming that the Department of Education has properly estimated the participation numbers. According to KPMG, the Department has no evidence behind these numbers, and these numbers matter a lot.

If these numbers are off by just 10 percent, then the cost of Biden's program would rise to $400 billion according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Folks in the Biden Education Department need to go back and learn some math.

At worst, the department is trying to hide the true cost to taxpayers of these debt bailout schemes. At best, the department is practicing shoddy accounting again. Either way, this is a completely irresponsible way to govern such a major program.

It is obvious to anyone paying attention that the department hasn't learned anything from its past mistakes. It was assumptions like this that got our student loan systems into this mess in the first place.

When Democrats passed the Income-Driven Repayment program, IDR, they grossly underestimated the number of borrowers who would participate. This, in conjunction with the student loan moratorium, has led to a $311 billion budget deficit within the Federal student loan program.

In other words, the Federal student loan program is already costing taxpayers a fortune, and the Biden administration's actions will make the problem far worse.

To put salt in the wound, the Biden administration's proposed changes to IDR will cost far more than they are letting on. While the department claims that its changes will cost taxpayers $138 billion over the next 10 years, a nonpartisan student loan expert has estimated that the true cost could be $1 trillion.

Senator Everett Dirksen said: ``A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money.''

This is real taxpayer money.

Once again, the Biden administration is trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

As chairwoman of the Education and the Workforce Committee, I cannot let this pattern of deception and mismanagement continue. I will spend the 118th Congress doing everything in my power to hold this administration accountable. Taxpayers deserve nothing less.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source