March 12
On This Day In 2019
“President Donald Trump again reiterated his support for hard-hitting cuts to the federal student aid programs in his fiscal year 2020 budget proposal,” reported The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), OTDI 2019.
“Congress has soundly rejected the proposed cuts in the past,” they noted.
A few of Trump’s goals included:
Eliminating the FSEOG program, which awards funding to 1.6 million higher-education students.
Reducing the reserves in the Pell Grant program by $2 billion. With that step, “the Department of Education estimates the program’s reserves will run dry (in) 2024,” notes NASFAA.
Eliminating more than half the funding for the Federal Work-Study program.
Eliminating the subsidy for Federal Direct Loans.
Trump wanted much worse. WaPo wrote about his 2017 proposal:
“Funding for college work-study programs would be cut in half, public-service loan forgiveness would end and hundreds of millions of dollars that public schools could use for mental health, advanced coursework and other services would vanish under a Trump administration plan to cut $10.6 billion from federal education initiatives, according to budget documents obtained by The Washington Post.”
“I love the poorly educated,” Trump once declared. As @amprog drily noted, “It’s one thing (to declare that you love them, but) it’s another to re-engineer American society to become much more poorly educated. But that’s exactly what the Trump administration’s 2018 budget proposal attempts to do.”
So that’s why the Center for American Progress summarized Trump’s plans as far back as 2017 as a “cynical attack.”
Sources/Links for further reading
The Washington Post spells out the issues with his first budget
The NASFAA details Trump's 2020 budget
Summary: Trump defunds education with a “cynical attack on college students”