Have you ever wondered who keeps track of the national government programs that work and those that don’t? Once you get past all the groups that claim to monitor the federal programs, there’s the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Part of its mandate is to review federal programs and, to that end, it has developed the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to help quantify if a program is working. PART can easily answer if a program is working, failing, or not showing any measurable results. From there it can make recommendations on improvements. It’s a nonpartisan tool that works! So why are there so many congressmen ready to ignore it?

The PART questionnaire shows the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) is performing “adequately.” OK, that’s not great, but it means it is working. It just needs some improvement, a little tweaking. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget has even made some recommendations. One of those recommendations is to increase the benefits to students currently enrolled in school. That seems to make perfect sense since that is part of the program’s directive.

A piece of proposed student loan legislation is currently going through the committee. It says its purpose is to lower interest rates for student borrowers. Unfortunately, it does that only for a handful of students for a limited time while tearing the heart out of the FFELP. This legislation would stop the FFELP lenders from offering incentives to student borrowers. In addition to giving up their ability to give rebates and special interest rate plans, lenders in the FFELP program would be forced to pay higher fees. Fewer tools to attract students and less capital to loan … Why would any lender want to be part of FFELP under those circumstances? Part of the purpose of FFELP is to encourage private lenders to help students. This new student loan legislation doesn’t explain how having fewer lenders would help more students find affordable loans for school.

It makes me wonder if the nice congressmen have even bothered to look at the recommendations before proposing legislation that doesn’t seem to help students at all. So why is the student loan legislation even being considered by Congress?

We are opposed to the proposed student loan legislation and middle-class families should be too! The government is taking money out of YOUR POCKET.

It only takes one minute to make a difference: call your senators, send your senators an e-mail, download a letter to fax to your senators, become part of our petition and help your friends find out the truth about the proposed student loan legislation.