Virginia Foxx

Ms. FOXX

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1568, I call up the bill (H.R. 8932) to establish an earlier application processing cycle for the FAFSA, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 8932.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 8932, the FAFSA Deadline Act, and I start by highlighting the critical role the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, plays in the lives of many American students and families. For them, FAFSA isn't just a form, it is a path to postsecondary education. In recent years, bipartisan efforts were made to simplify this complex, daunting process. The FAFSA Simplification Act, passed in 2020, was intended to make applying for financial aid more accessible and less overwhelming. That is what this country needs, an effective, user-friendly system that lowers barriers to education and increases access for students of all backgrounds. Unfortunately, we are here because the Biden-Harris administration is failing to provide this vital tool to the very students and families it was designed to help. Instead of the smooth rollout we planned, the Biden-Harris administration's execution of the new simplified FAFSA has led to widespread frustration, delays, and costly errors. Imagine being a high school senior working hard to qualify for scholarships and planning your future, only to be met with glitches, incomplete forms, and endless processing errors. That was the reality for too many students. Last year, the Department of Education delayed the FAFSA release until late December, 3 full months after its recommended October 1 release date, due to administrative incompetence. The soft launch that followed was chaotic, resulting in millions of errors and little clarity regarding the form's actual functionality. Delays in the Department's failure to communicate effectively left families in a state of uncertainty, scrambling to understand what aid they would receive, or even if they would receive aid at all. As we sit here, the FAFSA is delayed for a second straight year, and some capabilities are still unavailable, forcing students, schools, and State agencies to wait again. The FAFSA Deadline Act introduced by Representative Erin Houchin is the answer. This legislation seeks to hold the Department of Education accountable by requiring the FAFSA to be available by October 1 each year, and it does so with broad, bipartisan support. The bill passed through committee 34-6, sending a clear signal that both sides of the aisle believe families deserve better. In short, today's conversation is about restoring the promise of FAFSA, fulfilling our obligation to students, and making sure the Department's failure is not a new normal. It is our job to ensure that the Department of Education rolls out FAFSA each year with clear timelines and accurate data so American families can rely on this process. Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``yes'' vote on the FAFSA Deadline Act, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from Indiana (Mrs. Houchin), the author of the bill.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Owens).

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good).

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Kiley).

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, as my colleague from Virginia said, several organizations have announced public support for the FAFSA Deadline Act. Here are some of the things that they are saying. The American Council for Education said: ``Given the issues institutions of higher education faced during the 2024-2025 FAFSA processing cycle, it is critically important to avoid future problems. For this academic year, overall first-year enrollment is down by 5 percent, at least in part due to issues with the 2024-2025 FAFSA. In addition, universal access to the 2025-2026 FAFSA is already delayed, and some campus officials have expressed concerns about whether the FAFSA will be fully available by December 1. We offer our full support for this piece of legislation and hope to see it pass the House.'' Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Walberg).

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, the FAFSA is a cornerstone of America's commitment to educational opportunity. When we fail to uphold this promise, we jeopardize the dreams and hard work of students who look to postsecondary education as a pathway to a better future. The FAFSA Deadline Act is a necessary measure to protect that future by enforcing deadlines, ensuring transparency, and making certain that families receive the aid they depend on to make college accessible. This is about delivering the basic functionality students deserve and safeguarding their ambitions against bureaucratic failure. Students have enough on their plates as they prepare for college. It is up to us to make sure that the Federal Government isn't adding to that burden. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on this piece of legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Ms. FOXX

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, today I rise in honor of Mr. Ian Lanoff, who passed away on September 29, 2024. Mr. Lanoff dedicated his career to implementing and upholding principles inherent in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), during his time in both public service and private practice. Mr. Lanoff served as head of the Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration, the agency that preceded the Employee Benefits Security Administration, under President Carter and President Reagan. Mr. Lanoff's contributions in the early years of ERISA laid a solid foundation for the following decades. In 1976 and 1977, before his tenure as the nation's top ERISA administrator, Mr. Lanoff served as counsel to the Senate Labor Committee, the predecessor of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Mr. Lanoff also served on the Board of Directors of the Pension Rights Center, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that helps individuals receive the pension benefits they have earned. Mr. Lanoff's public service was matched by his recognition as a powerhouse in private practice for decades where he advised fiduciaries of both public and private pension plans. Today we recognize and honor Mr. Lanoff's direct impact on and devotion to millions of pension beneficiaries across the Nation. We express the highest commendation for Mr. Lanoff's dedication to protecting the retirement benefits of American workers. We also express our condolences to Mr. Lanoff's friends and family, including his wife, Patricia Lanoff, and children, Jennifer Lanoff of Washington, D.C., Julie Lanoff of Oakland, California, Lisa Applegate of Hamilton, New Jersey, and Keith Sprague of Waterville, California.

Ms. FOXX

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, the final frontier of the woke mind virus is the banks and capitalism themselves. They have already tarnished America's other institutions. Last week, House Republicans passed H.R. 5339, the Protecting Americans' Investments from Woke Policies Act, a bill that would confront and dispatch one of the most nefarious and hidden forms of wokeness: environmental, social, and governance investing, or ESG for short. In his book, ``Go Woke, Go Broke,'' author Charles Gasparino punctures the woke mind virus and ESG. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the book review of ``Go Woke, Go Broke.'' [From the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 8, 2024] `Go Woke, Go Broke' Review: The Worst Investments (By Tunku Varadarajan) Charles Gasparino is a gladiatorial journalist. When he steps into the arena to fight a money-man or enterprise that he believes is anticapitalist or crooked, he can be brutal. Making an enemy of him is not for the faint-hearted: Watch him trade insults with his critics on social media. He was once a Wall Street reporter for this newspaper, where editors and colleagues remember him for his no-holds-barred style. Which is precisely how we'd describe the approach in ``Go Woke, Go Broke,'' Mr. Gasparino's blistering account of ``how corporate America became something close to a foot soldier in the progressive movement.'' Now a senior correspondent at the Fox Business Network, Mr. Gasparino is also a columnist at the New York Post, whose irreverent, indignant (and often irresistible) tabloid style is very much in evidence here. (Fox, the Post and the Journal share common ownership.) ``Go Woke, Go Broke'' is a takedown of ``corporate wokeness,'' which Mr. Gasparino describes as the ``noxious ideology of progressive politics in the boardroom--an ideology, he says, that ``needs to die a thousand deaths.'' The book can be seen as a demotic complement to ``Woke, Inc.'' (2021), by the brainy (and sometimes tiresome) former Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy. Mr. Gasparino's is the better book for its plainspokenness: Many more Middle Americans--whose jobs have been outsourced or have been imperiled by the high-minded dictates of ``diversity''--will grasp its message. These are the people who, Mr. Gasparino argues, have been shafted by the Wall Street ``fat cats'' who've grown ``much fatter'' by their ``feeding at the ESG trough.'' ESG stands for ``environmental, social, and governance''-- metrics intended to direct or funnel investment in an ostensibly socially responsible direction. Mr. Gasparino is a populist-capitalist, and ESG is his bete noire, along with ``diversity, equity, and inclusion'' (DEI). These ``leftist shibboleths'' have, the author says, ``warped'' American business practices for nearly two decades and grew in intensity under the second Obama administration. Mr. Gasparino traces the roots of ESG to the 1980s and '90s, when business leaders began embracing so-called corporate social responsibility (or CSR, in its now archaic abbreviation). CSR, in time, evolved into bien-pensant notions of stakeholder capitalism, championed by the likes of Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Davos Man, writes Mr. Gasparino, ``represents the ultimate marriage of the progressive globalist corporate citizen with the globalist progressive regulatory bureaucrat.'' All this performatively moral investing is a revolt against Milton Friedman, the economist who in 1970 stated that ``the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.'' Friedman, writes Mr. Gasparino, would have hated ESG and DEI, ``among the most heinously anti-American management philosophies ever developed.'' (Readers of Mr. Gasparino's robust book will realize pretty quickly that nuance is for wimps.) Basing his book largely on a host of interviews with ``company insiders,'' Mr. Gasparino gives us entertaining (and informative) accounts of corporate blunders in the name of wokeness. He reminds us of the time AB InBev--the holding company for Anheuser-Busch and its beer, Budweiser--thought it would be a great idea to use a ``transwoman influencer'' named Dylan Mulvaney to market its top-selling Bud Light. Middle America revolted and stopped buying the beer, heretofore branded as a manly beverage. Mr. Gasparino also recounts how the discount retailer Target was punished by consumers for promoting ``tuck-friendly bathing suits for men transitioning to women'' alongside rainbow-colored onesies for toddlers. And Disney, recalls the author, erred politically and financially when its chief executive, Bob Chapek, embarked on a bruising battle with Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis and challenged the validity of a state law barring public schools from teaching sexual education to children before the fourth grade. In each case, the company's stock price tanked and sales plummeted. It enrages Mr. Gasparino that America's corporate management luxuriates ``in progressive causes as a side hustle.'' But in some cases, he tells us, these causes are the main course. Among the villains trying to ram ESG down our throats are Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock; Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase; David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs; and the ``ESG-obsessed'' Gary Gensler, President Biden's chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whom Mr. Gasparino describes as ``a male version'' of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, ``among the most woke, annoying, and . . . dangerous bureaucrats in government.'' Add to the list Adena Friedman, the CEO of Nasdaq, which demands that companies seeking to list on its exchange disclose board-level diversity statistics and, if the need arises, explain why they don't have a diversity of directors. Such demands aren't, of course, slapped on Chinese companies, which are, Mr. Gasparino points out, curiously exempt from all the wokest rules. When was the last time a Chinese company was asked why it didn't have a Uyghur on its board, or an LGBTQ+ person? Attacking Larry Fink as ``Mr. ESG,'' says Mr. Gasparino, has become ``a rallying cry on the populist right,'' whose backlash against corporate wokeness has been so fierce that even BlackRock has started to dismount from its moral high horse. Consumers' Research, a conservative advocacy group pushing back against ESG, derides the abbreviation as ``elitists, socialists, and grifters,'' as well as ``erasing savings and growth''--pungent and effective put-downs. More and more investors are aware that ESG-specific funds are expensive and rarely beat the market. In fact, writes Mr. Gasparino, ``they're some of the worst investments,'' even as they make it harder to tackle inflation by forcing curbs on fossil fuels. But Middle America appears to have woken up to the perils of ESG and is giving voice to its displeasure. ``It's now their Arab Spring,'' says Mr. Gasparino. This may be hyperbolic overreach, even for the crusading Mr. Gasparino, but he's confident that America's version of a grassroots people's revolt will end better than the one in the Middle East. Let's pray he's right.

Ms. FOXX. He describes ESG, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, as `` . . . among the most heinously anti-American management philosophies ever developed.'' This book amplifies the points we made when we passed our legislation last week. ESG is an ideological cancer buoyed by asset managers, banks, and financial institutions that kneel at the altar of anticapitalism. Americans saving for retirement don't want to see their hard-earned money go up in flames in ESG funds. They want a sizeable return on their investments. We need to embrace true capitalism again in America. This woke garbage needs to be put out to pasture and left to die.

Ms. FOXX

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good).

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chair, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Kiley).

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chair, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from California.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 3724.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 3724, the End Woke Higher Education Act. No woke week could possibly be complete without a robust debate regarding the state of free speech on college campuses. However, first I can't help but acknowledge the juxtaposition of this floor debate and debates in the university setting. The Constitution's Speech and Debate Clause grants Members of Congress the absolute freedom of speech on the House floor. It is a privilege that has survived 248 years of nationhood. Sadly, the privilege of the First Amendment and campus free speech has not. Therefore, I will use this time at this pulpit to make three conservative statements to express three truths that would otherwise be punishable offenses on today's college campuses. Men and women are biologically different. This position held by swimmer Riley Gaines endangered her very life on a trip to San Francisco State University. Student activists assaulted Ms. Gaines during a speaking engagement, forcing police to lead her into a safe room. DEI policies overlook qualified candidates. This sentiment expressed in a tweet by conservative-libertarian Georgetown lecturer Ilya Shapiro led to a 122-day investigation and his eventual coerced resignation. Finally, wear what you want on Halloween. This opinion, shared in an email by Professor Erika Christakis, sparked outrage at Yale. The unchecked student overreaction drove Professor Christakis to stop teaching classes. Men and women are biologically different, DEI policies overlook qualified candidates, and wear what you want on Halloween--these three statements, as unobjectionable and inoffensive as they may seem, are widely censored on college campuses. That is because, for every example of retaliatory censorship, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of self-censorship and social pressure to conform. That is why I support H.R. 3724. Not only does H.R. 3724 aim to protect politically disfavored speech, but all speech. To achieve this goal, it would, among other things, mandate viewpoint neutrality in the college accreditation process, require robust free speech policies before public colleges access title IV funds, and prohibit universities from giving political litmus tests to students and faculty. Mr. Chair, I thank Representative Owens of Utah, Representative Williams of New York, Representative Houchin of Indiana, Representative Walberg of Michigan, Representative Stefanik of New York, Representative Crenshaw of Texas, Representative Kiley of California, and Representative Murphy of North Carolina for their significant contributions to this bill. With enough like-minded Members committed to the First Amendment, we can once again renew free expression as a pillar of post-secondary education. Mr. Chair, I urge a ``yes'' vote on H.R. 3724, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Williams), the bill's sponsor.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Walberg).

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chair, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Owens), the bill's sponsor.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chair, it is astounding to me that associations of higher education in this country are opposing this bill, absolutely astounding. That should send a message to the American people about what the status of higher education is right now. I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Murphy).

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chair, we have groups that are supporting this bill, strong support. Over the years, we have worked with experts in the field to craft these policies. Let me read just some of the praise. The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal states: This legislation is an essential step in restoring the fundamental purpose of higher education to foster free inquiry and equip students to think critically and independently. Too many institutions have prioritized ideological conformity over academic excellence. Accreditation bodies and universities have increasingly promoted DEI initiatives that risk undermining intellectual diversity and free expression. I won't read all of these, but Young America's Foundation has given strong support, as has the Defense of Freedom Institute. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni stated: ``The respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act is a step in the right direction toward protecting freedom of speech, association, and religion on college and university campuses across the country.'' ``. . . Congress is listening to major public concerns as the battle for the soul of American education continues to play out in the form of hegemonic diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, the heckler's veto, disinvitations, and deplatforming.'' In addition, we have the National Panhellenic Conference, the North American Interfraternity Conference, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Defense of Freedom Institute, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and Young America's Foundation supporting this bill. Mr. Chair, may I inquire as to the time remaining?

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.