The "One Big Beautiful Bill", or known as the reconciliation bill, has passed through the House and is on track to pass through the Senate. There are provisions in this bill that are harmful to students and student financial aid.
Now is the time to act and let your members of Congress know that the bill in current form will have harmful impacts on students. Please use the tool kit below to learn more about the bills impact and how you can contact your members of Congress.
If you have any questions please contact Justin Ryan at [email protected]
Step 1: Find your representative
It is important to contact your member in the House of Representatives and both Senators of your home state. Use the link below to find your members of Congress
Step 2: Create your Letter
Use the template below to curate your message to your member of Congress, feel free to edit as you see fit;
My name is ____. I am currently a _______ student at ________ and a resident of District/name State.
I write to express my concerns about the proposed reconciliation bill, which proposes several extensive changes to Department of Education programs and initiatives, which include instituting significant new borrowing limits s on student loan programs and eliminating Grad PLUS loans. The bill also makes sweeping changes to other important federal student aid programs that would negatively affect students’ ability to access an affordable college education and that would harm institutions’ ability to enroll low-income students.
The legislation targets federal student loans, proposing to terminate the Graduate PLUS loan program for new borrowers and introduce new annual and aggregate loan limits of $150,000 for students. Along with these harmful student aid provisions, the long-term cuts to research funding will be detrimental to Americas future.
By making student aid less accessible and cutting research funding it will greatly disincentivize students from pursuing important careers in fields such as STEM, medicine, nursing, teaching and social work. These career paths are necessary for America to remain strong and address important national challenges relating to ensuring strong rural health care, enhancing K-12 education, addressing social welfare in both rural and urban areas, and continuing U.S. global leadership in key fields of science and engineering. In addition, capping loans will unfairly limit the choice of those students who have the highest financial need. The student loans I have taken out to complete my _____ program will help me to ____. Setting arbitrary thresholds on student loans will restrict my ability to _____.
I urge you to amend the reconciliation bill to ensure that students are not penalized for taking out student aid critical to enabling me and other students to complete our education in fields critical to U.S. national interests.
Step 3: Contact your Member of Congress
After finding your member(s) of Congress you will see a "contact your representative" option on the members website. Once there, fill out the from and copy the edited message from step 2 and send to your member.
Step 4: Complete Survey
Please fill our the survey below, this will help us know what offices were contacted and help us improve this process for future advocacy.