A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide for the exclusion from gross income of certain wages of a certified master teacher, and for other purposes.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I yield myself whatever time I take, and I do rise to speak in support of the conference report under consideration today.

I thank the Senator from Massachusetts and his staff for their participation and the way they kept us informed during the conference. I have to say ``kept informed'' because we were not at the conference, except for the one kind of superficial meeting we had where we got to make speeches, but they did a good job of keeping us informed. This seems to be the way that reconciliation happens. I know when the Republicans were in the majority that is the way it happened, so I am not surprised that when the Democrats are in the majority that is the way it happened. But it was very helpful to be kept informed on what was happening.

There are quite a few things that the reconciliation bill does, but I have to mention that without the reauthorization package it is very incomplete. We are urging the House to hurry and do the reauthorization part so that we truly have a higher education package. Without that, there are a lot of things that are left out, and I will go into that a little bit this morning in more detail following the vote.

This isn't the first time we have reduced the subsidies to lenders and provided greater benefits to students. Two years ago, in the conference that I was referring to, we produced a report that found billions in savings by further reducing subsidies to lenders and applied those savings to increased grants for low-income students, expanded loan forgiveness, and reduced interest rates on undergraduate subsidized loans.

We all agree if there is an excess subsidy in the student loan program, it should be eliminated. The key question is how much excess there is and how to eliminate it. There are no clear-cut answers to these questions. One approach included in this conference report is the reduction of the special allowance payments to the lenders.

I am pleased that we retained the provisions that recognize the unique role that our not-for-profit lenders have in providing information and services to students and their families. Not-for-profit lenders focus on communities and they serve students locally. For this reason, we maintained the 15-basis-point differential cut in the special allowance payments between for-profit and not-for-profit lenders. The

cut in the special allowance payments to for-profit lenders is 55 basis points, and for not-for-profit lenders it is 40 basis points.

Now, we took a first step in this conference report toward refining the way those levels are determined by including an auction pilot that lets the marketplace determine the appropriate level for the Parent PLUS Program, which is about 10 percent of the loans.

This conference report provides additional need-based grant aid which is a critical component of increasing access to and the affordability of college. Over 55 percent of the savings are dedicated to increasing the Pell grant award. In the next 5 years, low-income undergraduate students will see the maximum Pell grant award increased by more than $1,000. Additionally, we increase the income protection allowance so that students are not penalized for working and saving for college, and we raise the income threshold for automatic eligibility for a maximum Pell grant.

I am also pleased we were able to retain the guarantee rate on student loans at 97 percent for all lenders through fiscal year 2012. In this way we avoid the disruption in the student loan market and ensure that students have access to Federal student loans. However, I wonder if we may be going too far in cutting the support for the largest Federal financial aid program, the Federal Family Education Loan Program. The challenge we face is that we will not know until it is too late whether cuts we have made have undermined the stability of the program and created hardships for the students it serves.

Despite the emphasis on increased grant aid, the claim of increased savings for borrowers has a hollow ring. Reducing student loan interest rates is a good sound bite. It doesn't do anything to help students pay tuition bills.

Further, in reality, cutting the interest rate in half, to 3.4 percent, will help only a small group of borrowers for the loans they take out for 1 year of their education, 4 years from now. Then the benefit disappears. That is going to be a surprise to a lot of people, and it has already happened once. We were chastised when we were doing the last reconciliation for a raise in the interest rates. That is because the interest rate that had been lowered expired and there was not the money to do the further cut. This may well happen again.

A quick calculation of the real benefit borrowers will receive shows that at a cost of $6 billion to taxpayers, individuals, will see a savings of only $6 a month. That may be one latte; it may be two lattes. It is kind of hard to tell in today's market in coffee. I am astounded. I remember the days when it was a nickel a cup. I would much rather see the $6 billion go to help real low-income students through a Pell grant increase than just for a hollow sound bite.

Finally, as an accountant and member of the Budget Committee, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that we are debating a conference report on reconciliation, and that is a process designed to reduce the Federal deficit, not to create new mandatory programs and increase entitlement spending. I am disappointed to say that the net savings for deficit reduction in this conference report is only $750 million.

I wish to remind my colleagues that a few weeks ago, we considered reconciliation and higher education reauthorization together. The Senate did it right. We voted on reconciliation one day, and the next voting day we had, we covered reauthorization. Both bills passed with strong bipartisan support because we not only achieved savings but we ensured the quality and effectiveness of our Federal student aid programs. Therefore, my support for this conference report is limited by the fact that we are not also considering the larger higher education reauthorization package.

We have used this chart before when we were debating the reauthorization. This chart shows the pieces that are left out when we do not do the reauthorization. I urge the House to finish up this part of the package so that it can accompany the reconciliation package. It is not complete without both.

I do have some comments by House Ranking Member McKeon, which is an excerpt from the conference committee when it was held. I ask unanimous consent to have it printed in the Record.

It puts the emphasis on some things that will be left out if we do not do it and also some things that I mentioned.

I want to add some more emphasis to what is not before us today, and that is the legislation that addresses the concerns about rooting out the bad actors in student lending. It doesn't include protecting students and families who are borrowing money for college, and ensuring that students and parents receive sound, honest advice about their student loans. Students and parents must have access to the information they need to understand and manage their debt. We must ensure that the investment our students and families make in terms of time and money is a good one, that they are confident there will be financial aid to assist continued access to a college education.

Further, it is the reauthorization bill that contains the evaluation of the auction pilot that will help determine whether the auction model should be used in the future to establish viable special allowance rates. That is the way to test it.

Higher education is the onramp to success in the global economy, and it is our responsibility to make sure everyone can access that opportunity and reach their goals. The choice of whether to pursue a postsecondary education is no longer an option. We need to make sure individuals have all the tools they need to understand and shape their future. This conference report provides some important tools but not nearly enough to complete the job.

We are only seeing a fraction of the higher education picture by considering the conference report separately from the larger reauthorization package. What is before us today focuses only on a narrow slice of the Higher Education Act, one piece which is dependent on other foundational programs that are not part of the reconciliation. You can see that on this chart: Reconciliation takes care of a little bit; reauthorization takes care of the rest.

It takes important steps to increase assistance for students seeking a college degree, but it is only a Band-Aid without the important bipartisan reforms included in the reauthorization bill. We are cutting the bottom line without dealing with the quality and substance of these important programs.

The American success story of higher education is at risk of losing the very qualities that made it great--competition, innovation, and access for all. Our challenge is to make higher education more accessible, affordable, and accountable. By considering only reconciliation, we are not meeting this challenge head-on. We are leaving the job undone.

But we need the provisions in the reauthorization bill--better college cost information to help parents and students make sound choices; year-round Pell to reduce time-to-degree; and FAFSA, which is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. It is a document that has been rather intimidating to students as they think about filling out this form in order to qualify for financial aid. The form itself has kept people from applying. We have reduced that in the reauthorization bill to a one-page document.

I reiterate, it is the reauthorization bill that contains all the reforms and accountability provisions to address the problems that have come to light in the loan programs--the bad actors with conflicts of interest, the lack of useful, necessary information to enable borrowers to make informed decisions about loan provisions and repayment, and the need for better controls over access to the National Student Loan Data System so borrowers' privacy is protected.

We know America's ability to compete in a global economy depends on increasing the number of students entering and completing college. But of the 75 percent of high school seniors who continue their study, only 50 percent of them receive a degree in 5 years after enrolling in college and only 25 percent of them receive a bachelor's degree or higher. These numbers are even worse for students from low-income families. It is important to ensure that more students enroll in college prepared to learn and that more students have the support they need to complete college with the knowledge and skills to be successful. Low-income students who are striving to attend college need to know there is financial aid available for them to access college or career and technical education. It is the reauthorization bill that has all the support programs for first-generation and low-income students and the institutional support programs for minority-serving institutions.

For years, institutions of higher education and employers have expressed their dissatisfaction about the fact that our high school graduates need remedial help in order to do college-level work or to participate in the workforce. Nearly one-third of entering college freshmen take at least one remedial course. Each year, taxpayers pay an estimate $1 billion to $2 billion to provide remedial education to students at our public universities and community colleges.

What will help this situation? Not only do students need better guidance selecting courses in high school that will enable them to succeed in the postsecondary education, they need better prepared teachers. It is the reauthorization bill that has the partnership programs to support teacher preparation so that all children have qualified teachers to guide their learning experiences. Also, to be competitive in the global economy we need to be able to communicate with people all over the world. It is the reauthorization bill that authorizes the programs that support foreign languages and international education.

I began my remarks by stating that I am in support of the conference report. It is clear that I am equally committed to seeing that we reauthorize the Higher Education Act. We need both pieces to get it done right.

I thank Senator Kennedy for his commitment to moving the reauthorization forward and including several Republican priorities in this conference report. While this report is not perfect, taken as a whole and with its emphasis on providing additional need-based grant aid to low-income students, I believe we have reached a reasonable approach to helping students pay for college.

I thank everyone who has been involved in the process.

I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from New Hampshire.

I yield an additional 3 minutes to the Senator from New Hampshire.

I, too, thank Senator Alexander for his commitment to students in his State and across the country, and to the public purpose mission of nonprofits, such as EdSouth and, in my home State of Wyoming, the Wyoming Student Loan Corporation. I appreciate him taking the time to clarify this issue. I, too, agree with my colleague regarding his explanation of the intent of the bill with regard to nonprofit entities that provide Federal student loans through eligible lender trustees. And I join Chairman Kennedy in his commitment to make any further clarifications necessary to ensure that existing nonprofit loan providers that use eligible lender trustees will be able to benefit from the differential special allowance payment.

(At the request of Mr. Reid, the following statement was ordered to be printed in the Record.)

Mr. President, I yield myself the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I am always a little disconcerted that what the American public gets to watch is the debate on the Senate floor. This is not where we get most of the work done. This is not where there is agreement. This is where there is the disagreement and the branding of the different parties. It is important, but it is not what gets things done.

We have a bill before us today, and the Senate-passed reconciliation bill had a vote of 78 to 18. And we had some of these same discussions. Those discussions are important. As the only accountant in the Senate, I am appalled by the way we score bills around here, the way we come up with the different provisions, the different arguments that get made on the floor. But I would say the provisions of this conference report closely parallel many of the provisions in the Senate-passed bill.

There were clearly compromises made in reaching agreement on the conference report. We can point to things in the conference report that are there because of Republican and Democratic sponsors. In the end, it is a

product where the benefits to students outweigh the reservations that some of us may have.

Over 55 percent of the savings are dedicated to increasing the Pell grant award. In the next 5 years, low-income undergraduate students will see the maximum Pell grant award increase by more than $1,000. We will see who all takes credit for that, but that is what the bill does, and it will take people from both parties to get it passed. We increase the income protection allowance so students are not penalized for working and saving for college. The unique role that our not-for-profit lenders have in providing information and services to students has been recognized.

But at the end of the day, we must still reauthorize the Higher Education Act. Reconciliation is such a small part, and we cannot leave out the other part or we will close the door on our students. We have to reauthorize the Higher Education Act that provides the FAFSA simplification, year-round Pell, financial and economic literacy, better college cost information, and improvements in outreach and student support service programs such as GEAR UP and TRIO, in which all of us have an interest.

We have passed eight extensions of the Higher Education Act, starting in 2004. The current extension expires on October 31. How much longer do we have to wait? My goal is to not have a ninth extension on the Higher Education Act. My goal is to debate and pass a higher education reauthorization conference report. I look forward to working with Senator Kennedy and the House to get this accomplished, or else no matter how you slice it, the biggest piece of higher education is left undone.

I will have more comments to make on the accounting on these different things as we get into further debate after the vote. We did agree to a 10:15 vote, and I want to stick to that. I have a lot of people I would like to thank. I will also save that for later. I believe my time has expired.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. Kennedy, for his great explanation of what is in the bill we just passed. As the debate on this conference report comes to a close, it is necessary to thank those who worked long and hard to get us to this point. It has been a lot of people. I appreciate the extensive list that Senator Kennedy had.

Chairman Kennedy has done a marvelous job of pulling everybody together, covering very diverse topics, some of them very controversial, and working through them. What I always like to point out to people is that is not always a compromise. Sometimes it is a third way. What we are trying to do is get to a goal. This bill goes a long way toward getting to that goal. I thank him for his commitment to not only moving forward with this bill but to joining me in pressing for the comprehensive higher education reform bill.

I would also like to thank everyone on my staff who has worked to get us to this point. In particular, I would like to thank Katherine McGuire, who directs the whole operation, all of the different bills we are working on. There are actually about 55 in the process, covering health, education, labor, and pensions.

I would like to thank Beth Buehlmann, who has been the education guru on our side, who has led the team that I have that has helped put together these different packages in the education area. I have to say, our committee covers everything from birth to death because we start with preschool and then we have elementary and secondary education, then we have higher education, then we have continuing education. In this day and age, it is important for people not just to graduate from college, it is important for them to continue to learn. Of course, there is a direct relationship between how long you continue to learn and how long you live. But it is going to be even more important as the baby boomers are retiring that we encourage a lot of them to continue in the workforce--perhaps in different jobs than they have ever done before. So we have a lot of things we need to get done yet that we have been working on.

Head Start is one of those preschool programs we have. We actually handle 69 preschool programs. We need to do some condensing on that so we eliminate some duplication, some excess, and some spending. But Head Start has already passed the Senate, it has already passed the House. We are working very carefully to get that finished up now with a conference report, and I think we are making good progress on that.

On No Child Left Behind, the House has informed us they now have their draft proposal ready to discuss. We have been working on that in a very bipartisan way for a long period of time now, going back into the last session of Congress and now into this one. Again, I congratulate Senator Kennedy for the way he has held coffees to bring in experts who can clear up, in a more casual atmosphere, some of the difficulties, give us a better understanding and share with us some of their ideas on how that can be achieved. It has been extremely helpful. We have had meetings with Chairman Miller and Ranking Member McKeon from the House along with the President and First Lady and the Secretary of Education on numerous occasions. Those have been very bipartisan.

I would be very remiss if I failed to mention the commission that has been working on No Child Left Behind that provided us with a number of proposals, suggestions, advice on what needs to be done to make that even more effective. Those have been, again, worked on in a very bipartisan way to see which fit with all the other ideas we have. I think we will come up with a plan for that which will improve the system. It will eliminate some of the feeling that it is just about evaluating teachers and will give them more tools to know what their students are lacking so we do not leave whole groups of children, or individual children, without an education. That is the whole purpose of the program.

We are also trying to work in the high school area, where we can eliminate dropouts and eliminate some of that remedial work which is needed when they get to college. That remedial education costs billions of dollars to parents and to taxpayers.

Another important piece to this puzzle that we need to do is continuing education. We have passed unanimously through the Senate, twice over the last 3\1/2\ years, the Workforce Investment Act. This is an act which would train 900,000 people for higher skilled jobs or different jobs than they have held before, so they can retire and do something different and still be a contributing part of the workforce and continue to have revenue coming in. But we have never been able to conference that bill. I think that is a crime. We need to get it through once again, through the Senate, and get it conferenced.

I know some of the concerns were what might happen in conference. Now it is our side that should have the concerns about what could happen in conference because, as we have seen in conference, actually the minority can be left out of the process. I hope that would not be the case. But there is a lot of devilment that could be done, and that is why we didn't get to conference the Workforce Investment Act. I kept assuring that would not happen in conference, but now the other side should know for sure that anything they were worried about the Republicans doing in conference will not happen. I will try to convince the Republicans that the Democrats will show equal courtesy and we will not have to worry about what they might do in that bill and we will wind up with something that will actually train people to higher skilled jobs so we don't have to outsource those jobs to other countries. That is what is happening now. We don't have this training process to the level of flexibility where it really serves the people in the new occupations that are coming up.

The kids in school now will undoubtedly have more than a dozen different careers. Not different employers; that is real easy--you just quit one, move to an another, work essentially the same kind of job. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about moving to a new career. Why is that essential? Because a lot of the jobs that are available today will not be available in the future. Out of those 14 different occupations that a person will probably have, 9 of them haven't even been invented yet. That is how the world is changing. We have to be sure that the whole education process, from preschool to death, conforms to the new economy so people in the United States, citizens of the United States are the ones getting the good jobs; that we are not sending them, with the new technology, to other parts of the world. We can do it. We are a very innovative country.

This bill we have done today will go a long way to helping in higher education, but what we focused mostly on was just the financing. There are a lot of pieces of higher education which go beyond that and which the chairman and I have been emphasizing to the House that they need to get done, and we are hoping to have some very firm dates on when they will get that done. This could get into a Presidential election situation if it goes much longer. That probably would not be productive for higher education or our kids, so we need to get it done right away.

I have mentioned numerous times the things that have been left out of the reconciliation bill. I will not go back through all of those again, although I have some great charts, but I would emphasize again that needs to be done.

I will mention one area again because this goes back to a story from my earlier days. My first child was applying for college. I had to face this formidable form as an accountant. As an accountant, I have trouble understanding not only parts of the form but parts of the worksheet. This is a typical Government thing. They give you a worksheet to be able to fill in a blank of the final form, and the worksheet is almost as difficult as the form. As an accountant, it is a little tough sometimes to know what is even supposed to go into the blanks, but that is OK because the Government always provides extensive instructions on how you can interpret the blanks you are supposed to fill in. Hopefully on the new one-page form we have they will not have to refer to extensive explanations.

I think it is pretty clear what we have on the new ones. It is supplemented. Instead of taking pieces off of your income tax form to report on, you already have the form done, so the form can be submitted with it, and that has greater explanation than trying to do all of the math Worksheet B calls for. So we have simplified that greatly. But that is besides the fact that now it is very formidable, and that keeps a lot of people from ever applying for financial aid.

I had the opportunity to fill out one of these when my first child was getting ready to go to college and was picking a fairly expensive college, and I thought maybe we can qualify for help, and the financial officer said: Yes, I think you probably can; you just have to fill out this little form.

We filled it out. We were in the shoe business. We had a single shoe store. It was a family shoe store. My wife and I both worked there, and the kids worked there some of the time, and we had other people who worked for us,

too. We were going through all the crises that small businesses today have to deal with, like, how do you afford the insurance for your people? It is not fair to buy insurance for yourself unless you buy insurance for the people who work for you. We were going through a number of those crises. Anybody in small business knows there are those times when you wake up in the middle of the night with an ``O my word, how am I going to pay the bills today?''

Aside from that, I filled out the form and got the results back and they said: You really don't qualify. There are two essential reasons. One is, if you sold off a fourth of your inventory each year, you wouldn't need the help. If you sell off a fourth of your inventory and your child makes it through school in 4 years--which is not standard, but I do want to say all three of my kids did graduate in 4 years--but if you sell off one-fourth of your inventory each year, you can afford to send your child to college without any financial help.

I had to point out to them that if I sold off one-fourth of my inventory each 4 years, I would be out of business by the time my child graduated.

That is not quite fair, and hopefully we have made some corrections so that we won't be putting people out of business in order to get their kids through college, but we will be expecting them to make contributions to the expense of their education.

The other surprise was we had made our kids work. We made them save a substantial piece of what they earned when they worked so they could pay part of their way to college. This same financial officer said to me: You know, she would have been better off if she had bought a car because that wouldn't count against her.

What kind of incentive is that for the kids in this country? They really will appreciate their education more if they participate in their education. So I think if we can get that reauthorization part through, we will protect and incentivize kids to actually work toward their college education, so it will mean more to them as they go through, and that will probably cut down a little bit on how long it takes them to get through school because part of that money is theirs. I would like to see every kid be able to get an education and have some money left over when they get their education, not a whole bunch of loans. We will be able to help with that by passing this reconciliation conference report.

I do have some concerns, as everybody does when they pass a bill. I am the only accountant in the Senate, so when we look at some of this stuff and the way we score things, I do have some difficulties with it. We need to be aware of them because these are going to come back to bite us later.

One is the chart the Senator from New Hampshire used earlier, which shows how scoring works around here, and that is that you can provide benefits, and then if you can end the scoring at a particular point, you can drop off to a zero and show that you fully funded it.

It is not going to work that way in reality. I do not know who is going to be in the majority when we get to 2012. Nobody does. But whoever is in the majority at 2012 has to figure out how to fill the gap of the dip in the chart, as well as take care of the inflation that has happened in the meantime, and, hopefully, greater Pell grants as a whole, in reality, at that point in time.

Why am I concerned about this? Well, we have done some things with interest rates over a period of time that have had some of these same effects on students. We always try to figure out how we can get the lowest interest rate for kids who are going to college. And that is important. And a number of Senators, including the Presiding Officer, have pointed out the importance of that.

Well, we got involved in interest rates actually when President Carter was in office, and interest rates rose to 18 percent and were going higher, and did go higher. We had no idea how much higher. We had no idea whether they would ever come down again.

So Congress got involved with student loans and said: 6.8 percent is the highest that anybody is going to pay while they go to college, and we did kind of put some ends on that. In the meantime, of course, interest rates came back down. We went to variable rates, which allowed the Government to fluctuate more on interest rates. But each time, it becomes a problem for whoever is in the majority because you can pin the difficulty on them and say: `You have got to solve it. And no matter what solution you come up with, we are not going to like it, and we are going to make it into a campaign issue.'

Well, I hope we do not do that all of the time. But it is important for people to realize that we are cutting the interest rates in this reconciliation bill we just did, and we are going to get them down to 3.4 percent. But that is over a period of time. So students who are in college and just heard the discussion should not expect to go get a loan--or as soon as the President signs the bill--at 3.4 percent. That gets phased in. It will get down to 3.4 percent. But then it ends, and we run into the same situation that I pointed out a minute ago; that one party or the other is going to be in the majority at that time, and they are going to have to solve that problem of how we keep the interest rate at 3.4 percent or lower, or match up to higher rates, because they all have a cost.

Now, how does that cost get handled? Well, it does not make a whole lot of difference to the banks because we subsidize them up to a level, and we change that from time to time too. The subsidy is what we have been talking about in this reconciliation bill. You can offer this lower rate to the students, and then we will provide a subsidy so that you make a reasonable rate of return. Now, we always have a little trouble deciding what that reasonable rate of return is, and that is what we are talking about.

Two years ago, we cut that subsidy, and we cut it pretty severely and made billions in savings off of cutting that corporate subsidy.

Now, at that time what we did is put half of the savings in the subsidy, which actually comes from the taxpayers,--You have got to understand that it is from the taxpayers that we are doing this--but we took half of that and we put it to deficit reduction, which is kind of a return to the taxpayers.

We took the other half and did a number of things for students. We decreased loan origination fees to 0 percent. We put $8 billion into specialized kinds of Pell grants, which were the SMART and American Competitiveness Grants for science, technology, engineering, math, and some critical foreign languages. That is a real need for this country.

If we do not address that need, we are going to have some difficult economic times in this country. So we said we have to get more young people involved in science, technology, engineering, and math. And we took care of the college portion of that, encouraging them with a smaller amount their freshman year, and then a little bit bigger in sophomore year, and a lot bigger in their junior and senior years if they would do science, technology, engineering, and math. That came to $8 billion.

We also increased loan limits for freshmen and sophomores. We increased asset protection, and we increased auto zero to $20,000. That is the income level up to which you automatically get a full Pell grant. So we did a number things with the money for students. At that point in time we were criticized for a lot of things we did not do for students that could have been done, just as there will be criticism with this bill for things that could or could not be done.

I do think we arrived at a good solution, one that will work, one that I am hopeful and pretty sure the President is going to sign, that will make a difference for young people. But I do want to emphasize that we do need to finish that reauthorization package. Without that, a lot of this does not work. It sounds good, but it does not work. So let's get the whole job done.

Since 2004, we have extended the Higher Education Act eight different times. We have said: `What we have now is good enough, so we cannot reach any other kind of a decision. So let's just extend it again.' I do not want to have a ninth extension. I want to get the job done.

There are some great things. We have hundreds of pages. The bill is that thick, for reauthorization, that does good things for students. This is the part we are talking about we have not done yet. This has stuff in it that needs to be done, and we can do it.

The agreement in the Senate on this was 95 to 0. You don't get more bipartisan than 95 to 0. I am pretty sure if the other five people would have been here, it would been 100 to 0. That is agreement. That is because this desperately needs to be done. I am glad the House is going to take a look at it. In fact, the chairman told me that they would be using this bill as a blueprint.

I assured him if he used that as a blueprint and took the wording that goes with it, it can be done reasonably. Around here we usually do not do that sort of thing, though, because each of us has to get a fingerprint on everything, and that slows down the process sometimes. But I suspect it will be fairly close to what we have done here. It needs to be done as soon as possible.

Now, I began my thank-yous earlier. I want to finish my thank-yous and my speech. Besides Katherine McGuire and Beth Buehlmann on my staff, I wanted to thank Ann Clough, Adam Briddell, Amy Shank, Ilyse Schuman, Greg Dean, and Kelly Hastings.

I would be very remiss if I did not thank the members of Senator Kennedy's staff for their hard work and cooperation: Michael Myers, Carmel Martin, JD LaRock, Missy Rohrbach, and Erin Renner.

Finally, I would like to thank all of the members of the HELP Committee and their staffs for their hard work throughout this process. This has been one of the most contentious committees in years past. When we are working on education and health, this is one of the most cooperative committees in the Senate.

We do intend to make progress in all four of the areas that we work in. We got the pensions area pretty well wrapped up last year. There has been a little technical correction portion that we have to get done yet.

There are always different things in the pension area. But we made some significant changes in the labor area last year, too, that have come to light in recent weeks with the first change, the biggest change in mine safety in 28 years. We will be reviewing the tragedy that happened in Utah to see how that fits in with what we did or did not get accomplished and will look at future changes.

But it took us 28 years to make the first major change. It will not hurt if it gets to 24 or 28 months before we get the reports in that help us to analyze any other changes that we need to make.

Once again, I thank my colleague from Massachusetts, Senator Kennedy, for his tremendous effort, his tremendous knowledge, his capabilities to explain and come through with the ideas, sometimes compromises, but quite often a third way of doing things. It makes a huge difference in the result.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time under the quorum be equally divided.

Mr. President, as I understand from the previous agreement, we have approximately an hour, probably an hour and 12 minutes, that will be equally divided prior to the time of a vote on what has been labeled the College Cost Reduction and Access Act; am I correct?

Mr. President, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. President, first of all, I want to express appreciation to my friend and

colleague from Wyoming, Senator Enzi, and to thank all of the members of our committee for the work they have done on this legislation. This truly is a bipartisan piece of legislation that is focused on improving opportunity and improving quality of life for millions of Americans in our education system.

We worked very closely together when Senator Enzi was chair, and we have worked very closely together since I have had the opportunity to chair the committee. And now we have this legislation which is going to make an enormous difference for so many. I will discuss it in detail after the vote and explain it in greater detail in the record for both our colleagues and others who are interested in this legislation and what we have accomplished. But at the outset, I think all of us on this side of the aisle know that without strong cooperation and assistance from Senator Enzi and both sides of the aisle, we wouldn't be where we are today with this legislation, and we would not have successfully passed the reauthorization legislation in the Senate that has a number of very important items in it. I will describe those later on in the day as well.

We are also very grateful to the staffs of our committee, who have done a really extraordinary job during this period of time.

Mr. President, education is the engine of hope and opportunity for people of this country, and it has been recognized as such from the earliest days of the Republic. In my State of Massachusetts, our State constitution, written by John Adams in 1780, spells out in great detail the responsibilities of our State, of our commonwealth, to try to make a commitment to educational opportunities for the people of our State. And it has been replicated, that language or something similar has been replicated in all of the State constitutions.

Education is really the key. We have seen the progress and the changes that have taken place over the period of years, and we will have a chance to review that history a little later in the morning. But I am mindful today that establishing a benchmark is important in recognizing that this assistance to students and to families is the greatest assistance that will have been provided for the American family since the GI bill, the GI bill that was so successful at the end of World War II.

It has been estimated that for every dollar that was invested in the GI bill, $7 was returned in taxes to the General Treasury. Historians will point out that it helped establish the middle class, the middle class which has been the strength of our Nation over the last 60 or 70 years. There is no question about it. We built the middle class on the pillars of education, on the pillars of educational opportunity.

In this legislation, we invest $20 billion--$20 billion--and not a nickel of it comes as an additional burden on taxpayers. It comes from the lenders. They will be able to continue to provide opportunities for students through their lending agencies, and this $20 billion will provide direct assistance to the neediest children in this country. It will provide help and relief for families that have real debt in terms of interest rates.

Most interestingly, Mr. President, is the fact that it will encourage young people in this country to involve themselves in public service and public life through their communities. None of us can visit schools and colleges across the country and not be overwhelmingly impressed by the desire of young people to make a difference in helping to solve the problems and the challenges we are facing today.

We can look as recently as this week at the cover of Time magazine outlining this tremendous surge of young people wanting to participate in solving problems in their communities in a variety of different ways.

We have understood that, Mr. President, and we are saying to those young people: Yes, we know the cost of education has gone up. Yes, we know we have not kept pace in providing assistance to you to keep up with the cost of education. Yes, we understand your parents have been working hard, and still the middle class has been holding on by its teeth in terms of battling the problems of inflation and no wage increases. Yes, it has been more challenging for middle-class families to go on to college. And, yes, if they go on to school they will end up with a great deal of debt, which means they will not be able to go into the kinds of fields of service, service to the community, that they might like to. But that is going to change, and change dramatically, with this legislation.

There are many different provisions in the legislation, and we will come to grips with those as the morning goes on, but this is saying to the young people: If you finish up in school and college and you have debt and you want to become a schoolteacher, you want to work in the criminal justice system, you want to work with special needs children, you want to work for a nonprofit, you will never pay more than 15 percent of your income in repayment of your debt. And after a period of years, a 10-year period of time, your debt will be forgiven in full-- completely.

This is an incentive for young people to be able to go into public service and serve their community. I think it is enormously important and responsive to the time. I will have a chance later to go through this legislation in greater detail, but this is a matter of enormous importance. It is a matter of enormous consequence. It reflects the best judgment of those on this Education Committee who have worked long and hard on this legislation.

We are grateful for the fact the President has indicated that he is going to support this legislation. At a time of great divisiveness on so many things, we have taken an issue of fundamental importance to families in this country and we are saying: Help is on its way. That is effectively what this legislation will do. We will spend a good deal of the morning going over the details of it and how those general concepts I have outlined this morning will be implemented in the form of the legislation.

Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

I yield 8 minutes to the Senator from Illinois.

Mr. Chairman, the senior Senator from Louisiana is absolutely correct. The conference report does indeed make that change in the law. And I can assure the senior Senator from Louisiana that we will further clarify this language in the upcoming conference report for the Higher Education Amendments of 2007--S. 1642.

I agree and I assure the senior Senator from Louisiana that we will make this change in the conference report for the Higher Education Amendments of 2007, S. 1642.

definition of not-for-profit lender

Mr. President, I thank my friend from Tennessee. As I have stated previously, this bill reflects the priority of several of our Members by recognizing that nonprofit lenders in their States make important contributions in their States. My colleague is correct, it is the intent of this legislation to allow nonprofit entities that provide Federal student loans through an eligible lender trustee to benefit from the differential special allowance payment, as long as the nonprofit pays no more than reasonable

and customary fees to the trustee that holds the loans in trust for the benefit of the nonprofit entity and as long as the nonprofit was the sole owner of the beneficial interest in the loans on the date of enactment. I commit to continue to work with my friend in the future to make any necessary clarifications with respect to this provision.

Mr. President, how much time is remaining?

Mr. President, I want to be notified by the Chair when I have 3 minutes left.

Mr. President, for those who have been watching this debate and discussion, we just want to underline one fundamental and very important concept and principle: that the $20 billion which is included in this legislation--which is going to be used in the ways we have described earlier

today, with the Pell grants, with the loan forgiveness for students who want to go into public service careers, for some relief for the middle class--not a nickel of that is taxpayers' money. That comes out of the lenders' pot of resources, which many of us believe is overly generous to the lenders. That is another issue. When we have time after the vote at 10:15, we will have some opportunity to develop that issue. But this is a transfer of $20 billion from the lenders for help and assistance to the students. There is no question about any of that. That is No. 1.

Importantly, as we are coming close now to the time where we are going to be voting on this issue, I am very mindful of those magnificent words of Nelson Mandela, one of the great heroes of the century, certainly of our generation. On the occasion he was asked about education, he said the most important weapon for change in the world is education. That is something those of us who are strong supporters of this proposal believe in. It was said, in my time, by President Kennedy, and also by President Lyndon Johnson, that no American, no qualified student should be denied--should be denied--a college education because of cost.

That is a concept. That is a value. I would think all of us on this side of the aisle believe that very deeply, and many on the other side of the aisle. We would not have made the progress we have made over recent years unless we had that kind of a commitment.

We have drifted from that kind of commitment, that ideal that was set by Mandela, that was understood by John Adams when he wrote of the importance of educating the common citizenry in the Constitution of Massachusetts. No state constitution has a more detailed ideal established in its constitution about educating the public than the Massachusetts Constitution, written by one of the greatest of our Founding Fathers.

It was understood by Horace Mann when he established the public school system--the importance of education, the importance of education in terms of opportunity and promise and hope. It was understood by Abraham Lincoln in the height of the Civil War when he established the land-grant colleges to help and assist the education of citizens all over this Nation. It was understood by Abraham Lincoln, understood by Dwight Eisenhower, when this Nation was challenged by Sputnik in the late 1950s and the development of the National Defense Education Act, understood by Franklin Roosevelt with the GI bill that has been available for more than 60 years starting with a generation that fought in World War II.

If you take the total cost of that GI bill that was expended--and as most economists have pointed out, there was a $7 return for every $1 invested in education, $7 returned for the cost of education. Talk about expending resources, talk about national priorities, this was the program that built the middle class in this country. This was the program that made America great.

Now we have the opportunity again to follow the wise counsel and judgment of some of the great philosophers--Nelson Mandela and John Adams--in our time and in our generation to renew that commitment. This bill is a downpayment for it.

I agree with my friend from Wyoming, we have to go ahead and do the reauthorization. We will do it. We are strongly committed to doing it. We have passed a bill here in the Senate, and the chairman of the House committee has committed that the House committee will do it, and then we will finish it together.

But this is an opportunity. This is the downpayment. This is not going to be the only action that is going to be taken by us in our continued march toward progress in terms of the education and hope for young people. Not all the problems are going to be resolved. Not all the problems are going to be solved. This is a downpayment.

When we look at the priorities of education at other times, we have to wonder why we are even having a debate on this issue--and why we are just talking about $20 billion. If you take what was expended on education, on investing in the GI bill over the period of the GI bill, it was a third of the total budget. If we spent now on education what we spent then, we would be spending 130 billion dollars--not $20 billion. Imagine that. $130 billion it would be, and we are only talking about $20 billion. We were spending at that time all of that-- for what?--for educating the young people. Is there anyone in here who would say that was a mistake? Find the Members of the Congress or the Senate who said we have spent too much in terms of investing in the education of the children in our country.

Find me that person. I remember being on the floor of the Senate when we had strong voices in opposition to the Pell grants, to Stafford loans back in the early 1960s. I do not hear those voices today. I do not hear those voices today. Why? Because we know when it is done well, and it is done right--and it has not always been, but in this case it is, in terms of the Pell grants, in terms of the loan forgiveness, in terms of some help and assistance and relief for middle-class families--it will make an important difference.

When we hear the eloquence of some of our colleagues and about the difference it has made for their education--whether it is Dick Durbin, whether it is Maria Cantwell, who talks about the difference it has made in her family, whether it is Patty Murray, who said all seven members of her family had help and assistance in terms of student loans, and all of those people are professional people today, paying taxes, repaying whatever those kinds of loans are.

Let's think about what this issue is about. This is about hope. This is about our future. This is about progress in America.

Finally, this is the kind of investment we need if we are going to deal with the challenges and problems of global competition. We will have a chance to go into this in greater detail after the vote this morning, but we need these kinds of investments, and the kind of investments we have in the reauthorization bill in terms of teachers and the kinds of investments we had in the COMPETE Act that was passed in a bipartisan way earlier this year. We need this in order to stay competitive in the global economy, to make sure America's economy is the strongest. We need this investment in terms of our national security to make sure we are going to have the men and women who are going to be able to defend this Nation and use the various kinds of technologies that are developed.

Finally, we need this investment in order to have a well-trained and educated citizenry who are going to be able to breathe life into the institutions our Framers established. That is what we are talking about. We are not going to achieve all of that with this legislation, but it is going to be a meaningful and ongoing and continuing commitment, and one that all of us who are supporting this proposal recognize as something that must be followed up on and strengthened and shaped as we move forward.

Mr. President, I withhold the remainder of my time.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I wish to take a few moments, first, to thank all of our colleagues for the overwhelming, bipartisan support for the conference report. This exceeded the vote we had earlier on our education measures, and we also had a number of absentees today who indicated favorable support for the legislation. This is a very important statement about where we are as a country in terms of the education issue. This ought to be reassuring for the students, parents, and families of our country.

Again, I am immensely grateful to my colleague and friend, Senator Enzi. Without his strong support in the shaping of both the reauthorization legislation and this legislation, we certainly would not be here. He spoke very eloquently and well about the importance of the reauthorization. It is a viewpoint which I share for the reasons he has outlined. The simplicity of the financial aid application is key. We have 400,000 young people who are qualified for college but who do not go to college. Many do not go to college because they cannot work their way through those ten pages of an extremely complex, difficult questionnaire, and they do not have the support systems to assist them. This reauthorization will assist not only in the simplification of the FAFSA that Senator Enzi personally took a great deal of time with, as well as Senator Reed, but also with regard to teachers in underserved areas and the transparency provisions that will help parents understand the costs of various universities.

The legislation has a number of noteworthy features that the Senator outlined in his statement. With this strong vote, we want to give assurance that we look forward to working eagerly with the House to make sure we have a successful passage; doing so will maximize the impact of this legislation we just passed.

We will certainly work on the issue of college cost reduction and higher education access. And we have a number of other education issues we are working on as well. We understand the importance of the reauthorization of the Head Start Act and the provisions dealing with early education. We understand the importance of reforms of K-12, the importance of tying in kindergarten into the early grades. We understand the importance of getting well-trained teachers in underserved areas, the importance of parental involvement, the challenges out there with regard to disabled students, the challenges so many students are facing in terms of limited English-speaking capabilities, and the issues around accountability and growth models. There are a lot of complex issues, but we certainly want to wrestle with those and eventually have, as a result of working together in our committee, a seamless web of progress in the education systems in our country. That is certainly our intention. We are well down the road with the actions that have been taken today.

I wish to mention a few of these items we have in the legislation. Before I do, I wish to personally mention the individuals who worked long and hard on this measure. I failed to do it during the earlier presentation when we were under more limited time, but, as I think Senator Enzi knows very well, we have been blessed with an extraordinary group of individuals who work long and hard. Much of the legislation--the authorization and also the general format of a good deal of what we have done today--has been in the works for a number of years. It did not just happen this year. The authorization legislation we passed basically had the name of Senator Enzi on it before the changes that took place in the elections. We have been working very hard. We have been enormously blessed by an extraordinary group of men and women who have worked with us. These are complex, difficult issues with incredible implications.

We have on our Education Committee a membership that is very involved and engaged on education issues. All of them have ideas. One of the things that makes that committee so interesting is that we have an enormous number of ideas and suggestions, and it has taken a good deal of time to try to work with our colleagues on both sides of the aisle and then with the House. That was achieved.

I will certainly mention some of those who have done such an extraordinary job, and we are very much in their debt. Obviously, we are all honored to serve as Members of this institution, but those who have worked on this legislation should take a great deal of satisfaction in the difference they have made though shaping this legislation, because they have played an indispensable role, and we value very much their continued contribution.

On my staff I would like to thank Michael Myers, who has been the chief of staff of our HELP Committee, Carey Parker, a longtime friend and legislative assistant, Carmel Martin, Missy Rohrbach, Erin Renner, and J.D. LaRock. We have Emma Vadehra, Nick Bath, David Johns, Raquel Alvarenga, Liz Maher, Lily Clark, Jennifer Fay, Ches Garrison, Scott Fay, Melissa Wagoner, Dave Ryan, and Jay McCarthy.

This has been a bipartisan process all the way. I would also like to thank Senator Enzi's wonderful staff, specifically Katherine McGuire, Ilyse Schuman, Greg Dean, Beth Buehlmann, Ann Clough, Adam Briddell, Amy Shank, and Kelly Hastings.

I also thank MaryEllen McGuire, Taneisha Woods, and Jeremy Sharp of Senator Dodd's staff; Rob Barron, Ellen Murray, and Mark Laisch of Senator Harkin's staff; Robin Juliano and Chris Fick of Senator Mikulski's staff; Michael Yudin of Senator Bingaman's staff; Kathryn Young of Senator Murray's staff; Seth Gerson of Senator Reed's staff; Mildred Otero and LaToya Johnson of Senator Clinton's staff; Steve Robinson of Senator Obama's staff; Huck Gutman of Senator Sander's staff; and Will Jawando of Senator Brown's staff.

I would also like to thank Senator Reid's staff, Randy DeValk, Gary Myrick, and Jason Unger, and his outstanding floor staff without whom none of us could do our jobs, Marty Paone, Lula Davis, Tim Mitchell, and Trisha Engle.

I thank especially Senator Conrad and his staff. Without them, there is no way we could have completed this bill. So thank you, Mary Naylor, Joan Huffer, Lisa Konwinski, and Robin Hiestand.

And I would like to thank Liz Engel of the Democratic Policy Committee.

I would also like to thank David Cleary of Senator Alexander's staff; Allison Dembeck of Senator Gregg's staff; Celia Sims of Senator Burr's staff; Glee Smith of Senator Isakson's staff; Karen McCarthy of Senator Murkowski's staff; Juliann Andreen of Senator Hatch's staff; Suzanne Singleterry of Senator Allard's staff; Alison Anway of Senator Roberts' staff; and Matt Blackburn of Senator Coburn's staff, all of whom put in many hours to make this bill a reality.

As always, we worked closely with Chairman Miller's staff, and I would like to thank them as well. Mark Zuckerman, Alex Nock, Gaby Gomez, Julie Radocchia, Jeff Appel, and Stephanie Moore all worked tremendously hard, and Chairman Miller is lucky to have them.

I would also like to thank the Parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, and Assistant Parliamentarians Elizabeth MacDonough, Peter Robinson, and Leigh Hildebrand for their assistance throughout the process.

More than most, this bill has required significant help and assistance from the Congressional Budget Office, and I would like to give them a special thanks. Paul Cullinan, Deborah Kalcevic, and Justin Humphrey have put in tremendous work--nights and weekends and everything in between--to model and estimate the budgetary effects of the complex provisions in this bill, and all the many iterations and changes that the committee considered. I don't know what we would do without them. We certainly wouldn't have been able to move this legislation as expeditiously as we did.

I would also like to thank Mark Koster, Kristin Romero, and Amy Gaynor in the Senate Legislative Counsel's Office, as well as Steve Cope and Molly Lothamer in the House Legislative Counsel's Office, who also worked nights and weekends to assist in drafting the language and working out technical issues in the bill.

Finally, I would like to thank members of the education team at the Congressional Research Service--Adam Stoll, Charmaine Mercer, Jeff Kuenzi, and Dave Smole, whose expertise was invaluable throughout this process.

I wish to take a few moments to highlight briefly, once again, in greater detail, what the conference report will do. I outlined in the earlier presentation the highlights and the reasons for the legislation, but for a few minutes I wish to once again remind those who are interested in the benefits the legislation provides for all the borrowers.

It is a historic increase in the need-based grant aid--the greatest increase since the GI bill. That helps the neediest students. We talked earlier about how we should set as a goal not to let a single qualified student lose the opportunity to get a college education because of cost. We still have a long way to go. We recognized earlier in the debate that the cost of college has gone up extraordinarily. But at the same time, grant assistance has basically stabilized or gone down in real terms, and the earning power of the middle class has been level or has fallen slightly over the period of recent years.

So in this legislation we have tried to provide real assistance on the issue of burden in the percentage of repayment. We have done, I think, a first-rate job in setting better repayment options that cap a borrower's monthly payment at 15 percent of their monthly discretionary income. We have included loan forgiveness for borrowers in public service jobs, and protection for working students by not penalizing their earnings. So many of these students go out and work, and work hard, to earn a little money, and yet then they are outside the eligibility to benefit from some of important grants in terms of assistance. So we have addressed that issue. And we have provided matching grants to States to improve college access.

We cut interest rates--I was referring to that earlier--on new undergraduate subsidized loans from 6.8 to 3.4 percent by 2011.

We provide for scholarships of $4,000 per year for high-achieving students who commit to teaching high-need subjects in high-need schools. We didn't emphasize or stress that during the early presentation. This is one of the great and important provisions in this legislation. I think we all understand we need a well-trained teacher in every classroom in America, and we need well-trained teachers in particular in inner-city schools and also in rural and underserved communities. We need them to have the skills to serve, so we provide some important assistance to that end.

Senator Enzi mentioned in the reauthorization that we provide other kinds of incentives for schools and colleges to also move in that direction.

We support the Historic Black Colleges and other minority-serving institutions, such as Hispanic serving institutions and tribal colleges and universities. We increase funding for the Upward Bound Program to provide tutoring and other support to help disadvantaged students prepare for, apply to, and succeed in college. I will show why that measure is so important in a moment.

And we provide these benefits--all of these benefits--at no cost to the taxpayer by reforming the student loan industry so that it works for students and not the banks. That is the basic concept.

As we mentioned during the course of the earlier discussion, we provide loan forgiveness to graduates in public service. This chart mentions the various professions in which individuals can be involved to gain that kind of opportunity. They can be in public safety, law enforcement, public education, early childhood education, child care, public health--with all the Public Health Service agencies; or they can be working with special needs children and the disabled community, which is enormously important; the elderly, and the frail elderly-- increasingly a challenge for our country; public interest law--these are all the public defenders and legal services attorneys, as well as prosecutors; public libraries; nonprofit organizations; or teaching full time at a tribal college or university.

I mentioned earlier the article in Time magazine this week that talks about the attitudes of students in colleges all over this country, and that it is the desire of so many of these young people to be involved in public service and to help respond to the needs in their communities. They want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. So often, because of their indebtedness, they have to choose careers in order to deal with the indebtedness. So this legislation will open up or help us take advantage of that idealism that is out there. We are giving them a pathway to making a difference in terms of the future of our country, and I think that is enormously important. That is one of the most important parts of this legislation. We have tried to work on it, and I think it will be very important.

I might give a quick example of how the loan forgiveness works. A starting teacher in my State, making a salary of $35,400, has an average debt of about $18,100. Under the loan forgiveness plan, where he or she would not pay more than 15 percent of their disposable income, they will save $730. If they continue to work as a public educator, more than half of their indebtedness will be forgiven after the required period of their service.

If you take a similar situation, this is a police sergeant with a child in Arkansas, making an annual salary of $28,200, with a debt of $17,000. This will help save him or her $1,100 a year in terms of repayment. At the end, if he or she stays in law enforcement for ten years, $14,800 of the $17,000 debt will be forgiven. $14,800 of the $17,000 debt if they stay working in law enforcement.

So this gives you a good illustration about the loan forgiveness.

As was mentioned earlier, the higher education reauthorization bill, which Senator Enzi referred to, addresses rising costs by requiring colleges to publicize college cost information. This is a real problem. Parents have a difficult time understanding what the real costs are. There are fees and more fees--tuition, room and board. I was absolutely startled when the daughter of a very good friend of mine, attending one of our finest colleges, indicated to me the cost of the schoolbooks for going on to college--over $100 for a freshman schoolbook in a rather general subject matter. These are surprises that you are faced with; the several hundred dollars additionally that people are unaware of.

I know some of our colleagues have talked about this and we are certainly aware of this challenge and so we are going to try to see what we can do to help provide some assistance there.

Reforms to the student loan system will ensure that colleges are recommending lenders based on the best interest of their students. Those are the ethical provisions we have added as a result of the investigations received broad support in this from the colleges and universities. Many of them were stunned by what has been happening, and they have been enormously cooperative and helpful.

And I want to talk about simplifying the financial aid form. I give great credit to Senator Enzi and Senator Reed on this. They have simplified this form from an enormously complicated ten pages of questions to just two pages of essential questions. That will make a big difference.

This strengthens GEAR-UP and TRIO to improve preparation for higher education. The record of these programs has been extraordinary in terms of providing the bridge for many of those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds to get them started into college, and in terms of giving them the assistance and the followup so they will need complete their higher education.

Then, also, the reauthorization reforms and improves our teacher preparation programs. Teachers are the backbones of our schools, and the bill will promote high-quality teacher preparation programs, and recruit good teachers to teach in high-need schools--where they are needed most.

So those are some of the essential elements in the reauthorization.

As we said earlier, we are investing more here in the Pell grant. Here, I have the chart of what has happened in terms of the failure to increase the Pell grant to keep up with the cost of college. This demonstrates where we are going with one very important aspect, and that is the assistance in the Pell program. It has remained flat in the past. You can look from 2002 all the

way to 2006, and now we will go to $5,400 by 2012.

There has been talk that there had been some increase in Pell, all of which is true, but that was because there was an increasing number of poor students who were eligible for the Pell grant. We have nearly 5 million more people living in poverty today than in 2000. So we put more money into Pell to cover more students, but that did not keep up with the growth needs for the grant amount. The point being, this is a very important increase in terms of the cost. As the Chair, Senator Brown, pointed out, an increase in the cost of universities, a failure to provide an increase in grants, and the leveling of salaries of people have made it very difficult for many to pay for college.

In my full statement, I point out in a more dramatic form, what is happening in terms of the need for many of these students and that what we are seeing currently in our education system is the increasing divide of America. I think all of us believe, or should believe, that if we are going to be one country, with one history and one destiny, we don't want education adding to the separation of a divided nation. It ought to be bringing the country together--based upon ability, based upon hard work and enterprise and a willingness to work and to achieve and accomplish. What we have found in our education system now, for a number of reasons, though unintended, it is working to divide the country. It should not be. That is a very important issue that we have tried to address in a number of different ways in this legislation. I believe it is very important to do so. We have not emphasized it, stressed it that much in our earlier comments, but it is an underlying commitment we have.

In my more complete statement, I have reviewed the different ways we tried to do this. We are going to continue to work at it.

Mr. President, I have sought recognition today to comment on a bill I am introducing to help ensure the long-term ability of the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims to promptly dispense justice in all veterans cases.

In 1988, Congress created this court to hear appeals from decisions of the Department of Veterans Affairs, most commonly on veterans' claims for disability compensation based on injuries or diseases they suffered during service. As was discussed at a hearing I called last year while serving as chairman of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, the CAVC is facing some serious challenges, which may impede its ability to consistently provide timely decisions to our Nation's veterans.

In fact, between 2004 and 2006 the court experienced something akin to a ``perfect storm.'' The last four of the original judges, who were appointed when the court was created, all retired, taking 60 years of experience with them; the court's incoming caseload experienced a dramatic 67-percent increase; and the court was left with a single judge who had at least 2 years of experience deciding these often complex cases. As a consequence, the court received 30 percent more cases than it decided during that time and the number of pending cases doubled in less than 2 years. With over 6,000 cases still pending, almost 4,000 more than a decade ago, and with the court continuing to receive record levels of incoming cases, veterans seeking justice from the court may feel the effects of this ``perfect storm'' for many years to come, as the court struggles to eliminate the existing backlog and to keep up with new appeals.

For the men and women who have served, sacrificed, and suffered for our Nation, I believe we must take steps to ensure that they will receive timely decisions on their appeals, not just today but for many years to come. That is why I am introducing this bill to help the court deal with its existing caseload and to help ensure that, in the long term, the court will not face such a devastating combination of events.

As one means of helping with the current caseload, the bill would modify the rules that govern the recall of retired judges. Under current law, a retiring judge may opt to be recall eligible, which means the judge may be involuntarily called back to work for up to 90 days per year when needed and may voluntarily serve up to 180 days per year. For this court, like other Federal courts, the option of receiving help from retired judges can be an extremely important resource. In fact, last year, after the court began recalling retired judges to help with its caseload, the court's productivity rose over 19 percent in 3 months.

In view of the obvious value of having experienced retired judges continue to decide veterans' cases and the fact that they currently receive the same salary as active judges regardless of how much, if any, service they provide in a year, it would be a win-win situation for veterans, the court, and taxpayers if a retired judge opted to return to the bench more frequently or for longer periods than current law permits. To allow for that possibility, the bill would eliminate the 180-day cap and permit a retired judge to voluntarily serve in recall status as many days during a year as he or she wishes.

Also, because the court may need an unprecedented level of service from retired judges in the next several years to help deal with its caseload, the bill would provide an incentive for the current complement of recall-eligible judges to provide as much service as practical during that time. Specifically, the bill would provide that, once a recall-eligible judge has served an aggregate of 5 years of recall service, the judge will no longer be subject to involuntarily recall and will continue to receive the same salary, that of an active judge.

To put that into perspective, if a retired judge were to be recalled for 90 days each year, as current law permits, it would take 20 years to provide the equivalent of 5 years of recall service. In addition to allowing judges to accelerate their service into fewer years, at a time when it may be most beneficial to veterans, this change may also encourage retired judges to serve in recall status for longer periods of time. This should help minimize concerns expressed by the Chief Judge in recent years about how much retired judges would be able to accomplish in the limited 90 day recall period. With these changes, the court should have the judicial resources it needs to handle its caseload in the near term.

In addition, this bill would take steps to ensure that the court, in the long run, is not faced with a difficult transition like the one it experienced in recent years. By way of background, the original judges, except for one who died, all retired between 2000 and 2005, with four of those retirements occurring within a single 12-month period. Given the delays inherent in the appointment and confirmation process, this left the CAVC without a full complement of active judges for much of that 5-year period. As the Chief Judge testified in 2006, functioning with less than seven judges ``led to a backlog'' of cases at the court.

Perhaps more significantly, this cluster of retirements meant that, as of August 2005, the court had only one judge, the new Chief Judge, who had at least 2 years of experience on the bench. In the words of that Chief Judge, ``no other Federal court would be faced with the transition that we were faced with as of August 2005. Where else in the Federal judiciary system could I, the junior judge . . . suddenly become the senior judge, and have all of the experience of the court departing?'' The Chief Judge also opined that ``[t]his turnover on the Court has had great significance, particularly in the short term, on the Court's case management.''

The effects of this turnover may have been magnified by the fact that this court deals with a very specialized area of law, which by all accounts has become increasingly complex in recent years. In fact, the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States recently described veterans' law as ``a complex thicket of court decisions and statutory requirements.''

To further complicate the situation, the court experienced a dramatic rise in the number of incoming cases in recent years. In fact, in 2005 the court received 37 percent more cases than it had received in any prior year and, then, in 2006 the court received an even higher level of incoming cases. As I indicated earlier, the combined effect of these factors led the court to be ``in the red'' for several years, taking in almost 3,000 more cases than it decided.

Although some factors that have contributed to the court's challenges cannot be controlled, it seems clear that multiple retirements of experienced judges within a relatively short period of time can have a profound impact on the court's ability to decide veterans' cases. It is worth noting that Congress previously attempted to stagger the retirement dates of the judges by temporarily expanding the size of the court and by shortening the length of two judges' terms. Despite those efforts, it is possible that 6 of the 7 judges now on the bench will retire within a 4-year window, an even shorter period than the disruptive turnover between 2000 and 2005.

That is why I believe we need to try a completely new approach to help ensure that experienced judges will stay

on the bench for as long as practicable and will not retire in clusters as their terms expire. To that end, this bill would eliminate the term limits for any new judges appointed to the court and would provide those judges with full pay-of-the-office only when serving as an active judge or when providing service as a recalled retired judge. The combined effect of those provisions should encourage judges to stay on the bench longer before they retire and to regularly volunteer for recall service after they retire.

Yes, this represents a significant departure from the traditional model for article I courts. But as experience has shown, the current model is not adequate to consistently provide veterans with timely decisions on their claims and we simply cannot allow further disruptions in service to our Nation's heroes each time the court turns over. Once judges gain years of valuable experience in this complex, specialized area of law, we should not force them, and their experience, into retirement. Rather, we should take steps, as this bill would do, to permit veterans and the court to receive the maximum possible benefit from their years on the bench.

To avoid ``changing the rules'' on those judges who have already been appointed and confirmed, these changes would be prospective, applying only to judges appointed to the court on or after the date of enactment of this bill. In the meantime, I hope the changes to the current recall provisions that I mentioned earlier will help avoid a difficult transition when the current sitting judges retire.

In addition to these changes to the term limits and recall rules, the bill would require the Chief Judge, in conjunction with the court's stakeholders, to set guidelines for when recall would be appropriate, taking into account such factors as the number of active judges, temporary or prolonged increases or decreases in caseload, and the complexity of the caseload. It would also require the court to submit annual performance reports to Congress including information on the court's workload during the prior year, as well as an analysis of whether the standards for recalling judges were met and what service, if any, was performed by retired judges. Such guidelines should aid the court, retired judges, and Congress in planning for periods when recall will likely be used and when it will not.

More importantly, the number of recall-eligible judges and their level of activity are important factors that must be considered in determining whether the court has sufficient judicial resources. If current caseload trends continue and the court, even fully utilizing the services of recalled judges, is unable to provide veterans with the level of service they deserve, the addition of judgeships may need to be considered. These guidelines and reports will allow Congress to closely monitor that situation to ensure that the court has the necessary capacity.

Finally, the bill would recognize the critical and increasingly demanding role of the Chief Judge by allowing the salary of the Chief Judge to be increased by $7,000 per year, and the bill would direct the General Services Administration to provide Congress with a report as to the feasibility and desirability of converting the court's current location into a dedicated Veterans Courthouse and Justice Center.

It is my sincere hope that the fundamental changes in this bill will help ensure that the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims is able to consistently provide veterans with timely decisions, now and for many years to come. I ask my colleagues to support this legislation.

I also ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I have sought recognition today to comment on a bill I am introducing to ensure that veterans and their families have access to educational assistance benefits unimpeded by layers of bureaucracy and inflexible legal requirements.

Each year, the Department of Veterans Affairs provides educational assistance benefits to veterans, servicemembers, reservists, and their families to pursue a wide array of educational opportunities, including traditional college degrees, vocational training, apprenticeships, and on-the-job training programs. VA contracts with entities called ``State approving agencies,'' SAAs, to assess whether schools and training programs are of sufficient quality for individuals to receive VA education benefits while pursuing their programs. That SAA approval process was originally instituted after World War II to help stem abuses of veterans' education benefits, such as scam vocational and business schools profiting from those education benefits and then not providing veterans with an education of any value.

Today, unlike 60 years ago, schools and educational programs of all types may be scrutinized by a number of different entities, including the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, various national and regional accrediting bodies, and state licensing agencies. In fact, in 1995 the Government Accountability Office found that a substantial portion of the approval activities performed by SAAs overlapped with work done by others. Several years later, the Commission on Servicemembers and Veterans Transition Assistance concluded that veterans should be ``the primary judge of the appropriateness of accredited courses to their plans for the future'' and that ``[a]pproval of institutions accredited by accrediting bodies recognized by the Department of Education should suffice for veterans' training approval.''

In the years since those findings, Congress has altered the responsibilities of SAAs by requiring them to perform additional functions, such as promoting the development of apprenticeships and on- the-job training programs, conducting outreach services, and approving licensing tests. However, the traditional approval functions performed by SAAs, which are specifically required by statute, have not been significantly modified.

Last year, in order to assess whether veterans face unnecessary or inefficient barriers in accessing VA education benefits under the current system, I asked GAO to evaluate the extent to which SAA approval activities currently overlap with functions performed by the Departments of Labor and Education and what value is added by the services performed by SAAs. Let me give you a few examples of GAO's recent findings:

Many education and training programs approved by SAAs have

also been approved by the Departments of Education or Labor

and VA and SAAs have taken few steps to coordinate approval

activities with those Departments.

To streamline approval processes, VA should collaborate

with other agencies but, according to VA, that may be

difficult because of the specific approval requirements in

law.

VA does not require SAAs to track the amount of resources

they spend on specific duties and functions, including those

that may be performed by other agencies, and thus does not

have all relevant information to make resource allocation

decisions or to determine whether it is spending federal

funds efficiently and effectively.

It is difficult to assess the effectiveness and progress of

SAAs because VA does not have outcome-oriented performance

measures in place to fully evaluate their performance.

Although I have no doubts about the dedication and sincerity of SAA personnel in the field, I believe GAO's findings demonstrate that we do not have a systematic or objective way to determine whether the current mix of services provided by SAAs, which are mandated by statute, are either necessary or beneficial to the veterans and their families who participate in VA's education programs. That is why I believe we should overhaul the entire statutory scheme regarding SAAs, as this bill would do, to help eliminate redundant administrative procedures, increase VA's flexibility in determining the nature and extent of services that should be performed by SAAs, and improve accountability for any activities they undertake.

Specifically, this bill would strike statutory provisions that mandate what activities SAAs must perform, how those functions must be carried out, and how VA must pay for them. Instead, VA would have authority to contract with SAAs for services that it deems valuable and to determine how those services should be performed, evaluated, and compensated. The bill would also require VA to coordinate approval activities performed by State approving agencies, the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, and other entities to reduce overlapping and unnecessary layers of bureaucracy. To ensure that VA, Congress, and other stakeholders will be able to objectively assess the effectiveness of any functions performed by SAAs, VA would be required to establish outcome-oriented performance measures and SAAs would be required to track and report information on the resources expended on all activities they perform.

Finally, the bill includes a provision, similar to legislation that the Senate passed last year, that would provide a $19 million spending authorization for SAAs effective at the start of the upcoming fiscal year and would allow, for the first time, SAA funding to be drawn from both mandatory spending accounts and discretionary accounts. By way of background, since 1988 VA payment for the services of SAAs has been made only out of funds available for ``readjustment benefits'', a VA account funded through mandatory appropriations, and has been subject to annual funding caps.

For the current fiscal year, SAA funding from this entitlement account is capped at $19 million, but under current law there will be a $6 million reduction in authorized spending, to $13 million, for every fiscal year thereafter. Although the provisions of this bill would maintain a $19 million funding level in future years, it is important to note that that level is a ceiling, not a floor. As with any private- sector business or good-government business model, budgeting and funding decisions should be linked to performance and VA should contract only for those services that are necessary and valuable.

In sum, this bill would provide VA with the flexibility to streamline approval processes, eliminate redundant bureaucratic procedures, focus resources on services that will meet the current needs of education program participants, and ensure that veterans and their families will not confront layers of bureaucracy and inflexible legal requirements in accessing their educational assistance benefits. I ask my colleagues to support this measure.

I also ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I have sought recognition today to comment on a bill I am introducing to enhance educational assistance benefits provided to active duty servicemembers, veterans, members of the Guard and Reserve, and their survivors and dependents by the Department of Veterans Affairs, VA, and the Department of Defense.

In recent years, many veterans' organizations, members of Congress, and others have highlighted the need to modernize these education programs to support emerging and alternative education opportunities and to recognize that the role of Guard and Reserve members has been transformed since September 11, 2001. This bill would take significant steps in that direction by providing greater flexibility in the use of these education benefits, revising eligibility criteria to reflect current mobilization strategies for Guard and Reserve units, and enhancing the education program for our ``citizen soldiers'' who have been called up to serve in the war on terror.

First, this bill would provide veterans, Guard and Reserve members, and their spouses and dependents with additional flexibility in using existing education benefits. Traditionally, educational assistance benefits have been paid in equal monthly allotments throughout a semester or term. For veterans, the maximum basic rate is now $1,075 per month, which means a veteran may receive at least $9,675 over the course of an average school year and almost $39,000 during a 4-year college program.

This system works well for veterans attending a traditional four-year college. But, as the Commission on Servicemembers and Veterans Transition Assistance reported in 1999, the existing payment structure ``constrains veterans and servicemembers desiring to enroll in short- term career-focused technical courses,'' a problem that is ``especially acute if the cost of the course dramatically exceeds the benefits payable for the few months' duration of the course.''

That is why in 2001 I cosponsored legislation to establish an ``accelerated'' payment option for veterans' education benefits. With that program now in place, a veteran may receive an up-front, lump-sum payment of up to 60 percent of the cost of certain high-tech, high-cost programs. Since that option was made available, many veterans have used that additional flexibility to train for jobs in high technology sectors of the economy, such as the computer and telecommunications industry, the aerospace industry, and the electronics industry.

Then last year, as chairman of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, I supported legislation that would have expanded this option to allow accelerated payments for short-term, high-cost education programs leading to jobs in any high growth sectors of the economy. Although VA also supported that legislation, VA testified that ``implementation would be challenging'' and that ``[i]t would be cleaner and more direct if the bill simply stated that all high-cost short-term courses were eligible for accelerated payments.''

Having taken those concerns into account, this bill would allow veterans to receive accelerated payments for any short-term, high-cost education programs, and it would authorize VA to spend up to $3 million for those payments in each fiscal year from 2009 to 2012. Not only would this provide veterans with the flexibility to pursue nontraditional or technical educational opportunities, but it may help veterans quickly obtain job skills that currently are in high demand.

For example, the trucking industry is now experiencing a critical shortage of trained drivers, but the GI Bill, as currently structured, may pay only a fraction of the cost for a veteran to take the 6 to 8 week training course, about $2,000 of a total $6,000 bill. With the availability of accelerated payments for those and other short-term, high-cost training programs, veterans may be able to obtain the skills needed

to thrive in sectors of the economy that, today, are growing rapidly and can provide them with lucrative, rewarding career opportunities.

In addition, the bill would, for the first time, provide Guard and Reserve members with the option of receiving accelerated payment of their education benefits. They, too, would be eligible to receive up- front, lump-sum payments of up to 60 percent of the cost of any short- term, high-cost education program. For fiscal years 2009 to 2012, the bill would authorize $2 million per year for the Montgomery GI bill, Selected Reserve program and $1 million per year for the smaller Reserve Educational Assistance Program to make these payments.

To ensure that the families of veterans also have flexibility in the use of their education benefits, the bill would extend the same accelerated payment option to participants in the Survivors' and Dependents' Educational Assistance program. It would authorize VA to spend up to $1 million per year for those payments in fiscal years 2009 to 2012.

The second principal goal of the bill is to update and enhance the education program for members of the Guard and Reserve who are called to active duty. In 2004, recognizing the increased sacrifices being made by our ``citizen soldiers'' who are fighting in the War on Terror, Congress created the Reserve Educational Assistance Program for Guard and Reserve members who are activated for at least 90 days after September 11, 2001. This program was a significant step in the right direction, providing a maximum benefit of $860 per month for 36 months, a total possible benefit of over $30,000.

However, the maximum monthly benefit requires a deployment of 2 continuous years or more of active duty, and the Secretary of Defense has recently announced that ``from this point forward, members of the Reserves will be involuntarily mobilized for a maximum of one year at any one time, in contrast to the current practice of sixteen to twenty- four months.'' To bring those eligibility criteria in line with current practice, this bill would allow members of the Guard or Reserve to receive the maximum benefits if they are deployed for an aggregate period of 3 or more years.

Finally, the bill would provide these ``citizen soldiers'' with access to a valuable option now available only under the Montgomery GI bill program for active duty servicemembers. Specifically, it would allow members of the Guard or Reserve to contribute up to $600 in order to receive an additional $150 per month in education benefits, which amounts to an additional $5,400 in benefits over the course of 36 months. Under this bill, Guard and Reserve members would, for the first time, have access to this valuable opportunity.

With these modifications, we can take significant strides towards ensuring that current education programs are up-to-date and flexible and that they provide members of the Guard and Reserve with benefits commensurate with the level of service they are now performing on behalf of the entire Nation. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the bipartisan Methamphetamine Production Prevention Act of 2007. I am pleased to have the support and cosponsorship of Senator Grassley for this important legislation, and I look forward to working closely with Chairman Leahy and Ranking Member Specter to advance the bill through the judiciary Committee and to secure its enactment into law.

The Methamphetamine Production Prevention Act will take the next step toward wiping out the domestic production of methamphetamine, or ``meth.'' The bill will make it easier to use electronic logbook systems in order to monitor sales of meth precursor drugs and notify enforcement agencies when individuals illegally stockpile these precursors by traveling from pharmacy to pharmacy.

This legislation is endorsed by the National Alliance of State Drug Enforcement Agencies, the National Narcotics Officers' Associations' Coalition, the National Criminal Justice Association, the National Sheriffs' Association, the Major County Sheriffs' Association, the National Troopers Coalition, the National District Attorneys Association, the National Association of Counties, and the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America. I also want to commend and thank Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and her staff for their assistance in preparing this legislation.

For years, the manufacture and use of methamphetamine have plagued communities in Illinois and throughout the Nation. Meth is unique among illegal drugs in that its harms stem not only from its distribution and use, but also from the clandestine manufacturing labs that meth ``cooks'' use to make meth. These labs pose serious dangers to those who live nearby and to the surrounding environment. Law enforcement agencies in Illinois and elsewhere are forced to devote a significant percentage of their time to locating, busting, and cleaning up meth labs.

The Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, ``Combat Meth Act,'' enacted in 2006, took several important steps to reduce domestic meth manufacturing. These steps included limiting the amount of meth precursor drug products that a purchaser can buy, such as pseudoephedrine, and requiring pharmacies to keep written or electronic logbooks recording each precursor purchase. The Combat Meth Act has led to a drop in the number of meth labs discovered in many States.

However, domestic meth cooks have begun adapting to the Combat Meth Act. They have figured out how to circumvent the act's restrictions by ``smurfing,'' or purchasing illegal amounts of meth precursor drugs by traveling to multiple pharmacies that keep written logbooks and buying legal quantities at each one. According to Illinois law enforcement authorities, smurfing now accounts for at least 90 percent of the pseudoephedrine used to make meth in Illinois.

The next step in combating domestic meth production is to promote the use of effective electronic logbook systems. Law enforcement experts agree that if pharmacies maintain electronic logbook information and share that information with appropriate law enforcement and regulatory agencies, this information can be used to prevent the sale of meth precursor drugs in excess of legal limits, and to identify and prosecute ``smurfs'' and meth cooks.

This legislation, the Methamphetamine Production Prevention Act, facilitates and encourages the use of meth precursor electronic logbook systems in several ways.

First, the bill revises the technical logbook requirements in the Combat Meth Act. While the Combat Meth Act provides for the use of electronic logbook systems, several of the act's requirements are not tailored for logbooks kept in electronic form. For example, under the act, a prospective purchaser must ``enter[] into the logbook his or her name, address, and the date and time of the sale.'' This requirement is unwieldy for retailers who use electronic logbook systems, because many purchasers cannot type quickly or accurately. The Methamphetamine Production Prevention Act would permit retailers' employees to type the name and address of a purchaser into an electronic logbook system, and would allow retailers to use software programs that automatically record the date and time of each sale. Under the bill, a retail employee would have to ensure that the name the employee types into the system matches the name on the ID that the purchaser is currently required to present.

Also, the Combat Meth Act requires purchasers to sign a logbook at the time of sale, regardless of whether the seller uses a paper or electronic logbook. Collecting and retaining electronic signatures requires a large amount of computer memory, and the transmission of these electronic signature files to law enforcement agencies does not provide a significant law enforcement benefit. Sellers who use electronic logbook systems should be given the option of collecting signatures on paper, as long as those signatures are stored for the requisite 2-year retention period, and as long as the signatures are clearly linked to the electronically-captured sale information.

The Methamphetamine Production Prevention Act would permit a seller who uses an electronic logbook to collect purchaser signatures through any of three different methods: (1) having the purchaser sign an electronic signature device; (2) having the purchaser sigh a bound paper book in which the signature is placed adjacent to a unique identifier number, or a printed sticker that clearly links the signature to the purchaser's logbook information; or (3) having the purchaser sign a document that the seller prints out at the time of sale that displays the required logbook information and contains a signature line. These options ensure that each purchaser's signature will be collected, but they give sellers flexibility in developing cost-effective electronic logbook systems.

The Methamphetamine Production Prevention Act would also create a small but important Federal grant program to help States plan, create or enhance electronic logbook systems. Several States, including Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia and Kentucky, have already begun developing electronic logbook systems, and many other States are considering them. The Methamphetamine Production Prevention Act authorizes $3 million in grants

to States and localities, with grants capped at a maximum of $300,000. The bill imposes a 25-percent State matching requirement, to ensure that States have, invested in their logbook systems and have a stake in ensuring the successful operation of these systems.

Instead of mandating how States design their electronic logbook systems, the bill provides incentives for States to design effective logbook systems. Because meth smurfs frequently travel across State lines to stockpile meth precursors, State efforts to develop electronic logbook systems will be more successful if those efforts are coordinated with the activities of other states. The bill would therefore give priority to grant applicants whose logbook systems are developed in consultation with a working group of key Federal, State and private stakeholders spearheaded by the National Alliance for Model State Drug Laws. This working group will advise States on best practices in developing logbook systems and will help States develop logbook systems that are compatible and interoperable with other systems across the country.

The bill also gives a grantmaking preference to applicants whose logbook systems are statewide, are capable of sharing information in real time, and are designed to share information across jurisdictional boundaries. At the same time, the bill preserves the privacy safeguards currently established under the Combat Meth Act and State law. To promote accountability, the bill requires the Attorney General to provide an annual report to Congress that evaluates the grant program and its effectiveness in curtailing meth production.

The Methamphetamine Production Prevention Act does not mandate the use of electronic logbook systems, nor does it mandate the features that an electronic logbook system must possess. The bill respects the fact that States have enacted various types of anti-meth restrictions above the Federal Combat Meth Act baseline, and that pharmacies and retailers in different States have different capabilities with regard to electronic tracking. At the same time, we want to encourage States to coordinate their development of methamphetamine precursor electronic logbook systems so that smurfs will not be able to supply their meth labs by hopping across State lines. Our bill aims to strike a balance by coordinating the various State efforts, while still allowing States the flexibility to innovate and to respond to their specific State needs.

There are many actions besides promoting electronic logbook systems that we must take to address the scourge of methamphetamine. For example, we must provide for the prevention and treatment of meth use, and we must also prevent the illegal distribution of meth and its precursors over the Internet and from other countries. However, law enforcement experts agree that electronic logbook systems are an important tool in our effort to combat meth, particularly domestic meth labs. We can, and should, do more to help make these logbook systems work.

By facilitating and encouraging the use of electronic logbook systems, the Methamphetamine Production Prevention Act will help wipe out domestic meth labs and the environmental and social harms they cause. The bill will also help free up law enforcement resources from meth lab busts and cleanup, allowing our law enforcement agencies to focus on other crime prevention and enforcement efforts. The production of methamphetamine has plagued our communities for far too long, and this legislation takes a critical step to stop it. I urge the Senate to pass this important bill.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support the Homeland Security Education Act. This bill encourages initiatives to increase the number of Americans trained in science, technology, engineering, math, and foreign languages.

More than a century ago, Henry Ford revolutionized transportation and industry with the creation of the Model T. This car and the process designed to create it were so innovative that it was copied by every other company. The Model T became the base model for all cars that followed. This is a classic American story. Some of the most important scientific breakthroughs in modern history have occurred in the labs, workshops, and classrooms of America. We take pride in our Nation's ability to meet any challenge and solve any problem with innovation and discovery. But we are falling behind. Today's innovations in the auto industry come not from Detroit but from Japan. Engineers in Asia are designing tomorrow's hybrid car while Henry Ford's company and other American companies are just trying to keep up.

America's colleges and universities can play an important role in reversing the decline in American innovation. The United States graduates some of the world's best engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, but a far higher proportion of the students in China, India, South Korea, and Japan are focusing on these fields. The National Academies of Science reports that in 2004, only 32 percent of the undergraduate degrees awarded in the United States were in science or engineering compared to 59 percent in China and 66 percent in Japan. If we do not address this crisis soon, China, India, and Japan will become the new centers for scientific and technological innovation, while American workers scramble to keep up. We must act now to ensure that America remains the world's economic, scientific, and technological leader.

American workers are also increasingly finding themselves at a disadvantage in a multilingual global community. In our increasingly global economy and with a heightened concern for security in the post- 911 world, we need Americans who can speak a foreign language. Only 9 percent of American students enroll in a foreign language course in college. We especially need to focus on less commonly taught languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, and Korean, and other languages that are of particular value in the world today.

The best place to address both of these concerns is in the classroom. We must adapt our educational system by providing the teachers and resources needed to encourage students to study science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and foreign languages. The Homeland Security Education Act is an important step in the right direction.

This bill would encourage students to pursue math, science, technology, engineering, and critical foreign languages by providing them with $5,000 scholarships. Scientists, engineers, technology professionals, and those fluent in foreign languages would be encouraged to return to the classroom and use their career experiences to inspire students in high-need or low-income schools. New grant programs would encourage educational institutions, public entities, and businesses to enter into partnerships that improve math and science curricula, establish programs that promote students' foreign language proficiency along with their science and technological knowledge, and create and establish foreign language pathways from elementary school through college. Finally, the bill would fund a student loan repayment program for qualified individuals trained in science, technology, engineering, math, and foreign languages who join the Federal workforce.

Our country is quickly approaching a crisis of competitiveness. To avoid falling behind our international competitors in science and innovation, we must confront this problem immediately in our schools. We need to strengthen our students' proficiency in science, technology, engineering, math, and foreign languages and provide them with the incentives necessary to pursue careers in those fields. Today's students are tomorrow's innovators, scientists, and technology leaders, and we can't afford not to invest in them. I encourage my colleagues to join me in cosponsoring the Homeland Security Education Act.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, the bill before us today from a policy standpoint does some things which are extremely positive. It adjusts, I think appropriately, the cost of the amount of subsidy that is going into the system relative to higher education loans and takes savings from that subsidy, which was going to lenders, and moves it over to assist people who need assistance, especially under the Pell Grant Program.

So it is, from a policy standpoint, moving in the right direction in many ways. In addition, as the Senator from Wyoming has pointed out, there needs to be tied to this a Higher Education Reauthorization Act, which unfortunately is not in this bill and needs to be in this bill in order to complete the package. That is critical to this whole undertaking in making sure we significantly improve our ability to support people who are going to college, making sure the loans which these people get are properly disclosed and that the money does not end up, as we increase the Pell grants, being taken away by increasing tuitions which are tied to our Pell grant increases.

So there are good things about this bill. There is also a big part of this bill that is missing, which is the Higher Education Reauthorization Act, and certainly the Senator from Wyoming made an eloquent statement on that.

What I wished to talk about, however, was the fact that this bill comes to the floor in an inappropriate way, using the wrong vehicle, and as a result deems serious harm to the budget process we have in the Congress. This bill comes under what is known as reconciliation. Reconciliation is a very unique vehicle which we have in the Senate, the purpose of which is to avoid filibusters and allow legislation to move, which is going to be used on the spending side of the ledger, at least, to reduce entitlement spending.

It was created out of the 1974 Budget Act. It has been used over the years for the purposes of reconciliation, of reducing entitlement spending. In fact, in 1990, it reduced entitlement spending--it was used to reduce about $480 billion in entitlement spending over a 10- year period; in 1993, about $433 billion; in 1995, about $337 billion; in 1997, about $118 billion; and then in 2006, about $36 billion. Why do we use this mechanism? Well, every year we have two different types of spending in the Federal Government. We have discretionary spending, which means it occurs on an annual basis and is appropriated, it goes through the Appropriations Committee. That represents about a third of the Federal Government spending. Then we have entitlement spending, which is spending that occurs where the Federal Government, as a result of laws, has an obligation to pay money to somebody.

Agriculture programs are, for example, entitlement programs, where if you plant a certain amount of fields or do not plant a certain amount of fields, you have a right to obtain payment from the Federal Government under the law. Medicare is an entitlement program. We have a lot of education programs which are arguably entitlement programs and a lot that are discretionary programs.

But the problem is, when you have an entitlement program, you cannot adjust it annually through the appropriations process. The only way you can adjust it is by changing the law which affects that program and creates savings or more spending. So the Budget Act recognized this and also recognizes it is extremely hard to do that in the context of the Senate because the Senate has the filibuster, where you can basically tie anything up without 60 votes. It also requires 60 votes to pass just about anything.

So this very unique and very powerful instrument was given to the budgeting process called reconciliation, where there is a limited amount of time to debate a bill, in this case 10 hours as a result of a conference report, no filibuster can apply, and it only takes 51 votes to pass the bill.

But this whole concept of giving this very strong power to the Budget Committee and to the committees of jurisdiction was to allow us to reduce the rate of growth of entitlement spending in order to make the budget more manageable.

What has happened, however, has been to reverse that, to actually do the exact opposite using reconciliation, with the representation that we are going to save, I believe it is $750 million, which is minuscule--remember that over the years we have been saving billions of dollars through reconciliation--with the representation that we are going to save $750 million. We have a chart which reflects this. These are savings which we have received under reconciliation when we have used it in the past: $428 billion; $433 billion; up until 2006, we did $39 billion.

This year, this reconciliation bill, saves less than $1 billion net. So it is not a savings vehicle at all. In fact, what it does is it uses that $93 billion savings to mask an almost $21 billion spending event.

It takes the reconciliation--as long as you get a net savings, you are allowed to use reconciliation--and uses it to dramatically increase spending. In fact, the amount of new spending in this reconciliation bill exceeds the amount of savings by 2,900 percent. In other words, the spending in this bill is 29 times larger than the savings in this bill, which totally undermines and makes a joke out of the budget process and reconciliation, and it is totally inappropriate to have done this, to use reconciliation in this manner.

It could be effectively argued the proposals that have been brought forward under this bill would easily pass this Congress with 60 votes, with or without reconciliation. But by using reconciliation, they allowed themselves to eliminate all amendments, for all intents and purposes of any significance, and they have this 51-vote rule, and as a result of spending 2,900 times more than they save, they essentially make a mockery of the budget process.

Not only do they make a mockery of the budget process on the issue of reconciliation, they make a mockery of the budget process by the manner in which they score the bill itself. This bill is set up so the Pell grants will increase, which is what the goal of the bill is, to $5,400 per person, but the spending on the Pell grants will also increase rather dramatically over the next few years because we are taking a subsidy which is now going to lenders and putting it into Pell spending.

But in the year 2013, under this bill, we are going to go back to zero, essentially zero dollars being spent on Pell grants. That is what this bill calls for in 2013, zero dollars essentially will be spent on Pell grants.

What a farce. I mean, really. In order for them to take advantage of reconciliation and the protection of reconciliation, they had to put in place a program which goes from almost $5 billion in the year 2012, down to zero in 2013. Talk about truth in budgeting or integrity in budgeting. How can anybody vote for this who believes we should have an honest budget and claim that they are being honest?

There is $9 billion of Pell grant, which one could realistically argue over the next 10 years is going to have to be spent, which isn't accounted for. It is sort of, well, it will appear from the sky, I guess. One would think that would be enough; that basically the proposal makes a mockery of the reconciliation process in the budget, makes a mockery of the baseline by going back to zero spending in 2013. But then we get to pay-go; pay-go, the sacred cow of fiscal discipline from the other side of the aisle that we hear so much about. We are going to stand by pay-go in order to discipline Federal Government spending. We heard that incessantly in the last Congress from the other side of the aisle. We heard it incessantly from people running for office from the other side of the aisle. But it has become Swiss cheese as bill after bill after bill has been brought to the floor which has waived pay-go when it came to spending. What a surprise. The Democratic majority waives pay-go when they want to spend money.

I ask unanimous consent for an additional 3 minutes.

Then they claim they are using pay-go to discipline the Federal Government. It has happened time and time again. The most recent egregious event prior to this one was SCHIP, where they added $41 billion of new spending waiving pay-go. This $6 billion down here that was a pay-go violation has now grown to be about

$20 billion under this bill. So the little hole in the Swiss cheese should be a great big hole.

Anyone who comes to this floor and claims they are using pay-go to discipline the Federal budget at any time for the rest of this Congress will have to have a sanity test given to them because they certainly can't defend that on the basis of any facts.

The problem with this bill isn't the policy. In fact, quite honestly, I would have probably used a more aggressive policy. I would have been willing to auction all these accounts to get to the real number as to what the subsidy is. We might have saved a lot more money and put more money into Pell. The problem is, this bill, in the manner in which it is brought to the floor, basically puts a stake through the heart of the budget process. It takes reconciliation, which is the most significant tool of the budget process, and makes a joke out of it by using it to increase spending 2,900 times more than it creates savings. It takes the baseline and makes a joke out of it by reducing Pell grants in 2013 to zero spending, when we know we are going to be spending $5.5 billion on Pell grants in 2013. It takes pay-go, which is alleged to be a disciplining mechanism, waives it, and then spends $21 billion that would have been subject to it.

My point is obviously one of frustration, as former chairman of the Budget Committee. I would like to see us have a budget that means something. We didn't pass a budget. The Democratic Party passed a budget; I congratulated them for that. I didn't agree with it, but at least they passed it. But if they are going to pass it, they ought to have a purpose for it, and they ought to live by it. The purpose should not be to expand spending, to make a joke of the baseline, and to basically put holes in the pay-go mechanism which they claim is the essence of their fiscal discipline.

From a public policy standpoint, the bill may have good policy in it, but from the standpoint of managing the fiscal house of this country, it is doing fundamental harm to the budget process.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

I appreciate the Senator from Wyoming yielding to me. I know the Senator from Illinois would have yielded for a question, but his statement carried him away. Please note, I have no water on my desk--not by choice but I suspect that they don't trust me with it. I was glad to learn that it is the water that has caused the dysfunctionality of the Senate. I had been beginning to think maybe it was the Democratic leadership, since the change of hands. But getting this clarified is very important.

I do want to make this simple point: Pell grants were expanded through SMART grants when we did the last reconciliation, when I was chairman of the Budget Committee. We put $8 billion in the SMART grants, which helped kids, especially freshman and sophomores. We eliminated the origination fees, and we also increased the auto zero to $20,000, and we increased the asset protection allocation. So we did make these decisions. But at the same time we reduced the funds to lenders and put a significant amount of it into deficit reduction, $40 billion into deficit reduction.

The Senator from Illinois takes the position that when we cut taxes, we were having the same impact on the budget as when they increased spending. That is the difference between the parties. It is fundamental. We believe when we leave people's dollars in their pockets and they get to spend it themselves--because it is their money to begin with--that is not necessarily aggravating the Federal budget situation. They believe when you take the money out of people's pockets and expand the size of the Government--in this case, 2,900 times more than you save in the area of spending reduction--that is good, because there is a philosophical difference here.

The philosophical difference, quite simply, is the Democratic Party believes it knows better how to spend people's money than the people know how to spend their money. We believe the people know how to better spend their money better than the Federal Government does. That is the difference.

Well, Mr. President, first I would like to complete my thought on this point because I think it is critical. The budget reconciliation process was not set up to be a stalking-horse for dramatic expansion in the size of Federal Government entitlement programs. That was not the purpose of the reconciliation structure. It was set up for the purposes of being able to control the rate of growth of entitlement programs.

Now, we can debate whether the budget process was set up for the purposes of allowing us to return more tax dollars to taxpayers with reasonable tax rates, but certainly on the issue of spending, there is no question but that reconciliation was not intended to expand entitlement spending.

independent students

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.