Republicans, Taxpayers Group Urge Support for Proposed Tax Tables Update

Members of the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce have in recent weeks been working to win the war of public perception concerning a controversial change in state and federal tax tables used to determine financial need for federal aid.

In late November House Democratic and Republican leaders issued dueling press releases addressing the recent decision by the appropriations conference committee to resurrect a plan to update state and local tax tables for the Federal Need Analysis Methodology.

Republican Committee Chairman John Boehner (Ohio) urged lawmakers to enact the update immediately, noting in a November 22 release that continuing to use outdated tax information "could mean shortchanging eligible students and deepening the Pell Grant budget shortfall." The release was accompanied by a fact sheet outlining the GOP's stance on the Pell Grant issue.

In a minority staff press release criticizing the decision to move forward with the tax table update, House Committee on Education and the Workforce Ranking Member George Miller (D-Calif.) asserted that the change would mean that an estimated 84,000 students will see their Pell Grants eliminated, and that another 1.2 million students will see their college grants or loans reduced.

Now, in the most recent salvo, the education committee's majority staff has posted a December 3 letter from the National Taxpayer's Union (NTU) concurring with Boehner on the Pell tax tables and commenting on higher education investment.

In this newest effort to influence public opinion, the letter from the NTU states: "Pell Grant funding has already increased by an alarming 42% from FY 2001 to FY 2005. If using more current tax data allows existing Pell Grants to be directed more readily toward the middle- and low-income recipients for whom the program was designed, perhaps those lawmakers agitating to boost levels still-higher will be deprived of a convenient political weapon for doing so."

"Indeed," the group continues, "it is likely that outdated eligibility information was one factor propelling this cost spiral in recent years."

The NTU letter comes directly in the wake of other GOP efforts to combat what they consider to be an unfair PR campaign against the proposed update. On November 24, Boehner's staff posted a memo to editorial writers noting that, "what lobbyists and Democratic Party leaders know, but are not saying, is that using the outdated tax tables effectively cheats the poorest students in America--the very students the Pell program was created to serve. If opponents succeed in forcing the administration to continue using the outdated tables, it would likely mean wrongly adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the current Pell grant budget shortfall."

By Elizabeth B. Guerard
NASFAA Assistant Director for Communications

Posted December 10, 2004 on www.NASFAA.org, the Web Site of the
National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA).
Copyright 2004. Redistribution to non-NASFAA institutions is prohibited
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