Thomas E. Petri: “Madam Chairman, I rise in support of this commonsense amendment. The Lender of Last Resort program was never intended to…”

“Madam Chairman, I rise in support of this commonsense amendment. The Lender of Last Resort program was never intended to serve as a bailout for our student loan system as a whole. Rather, it was developed as a backstop for individual students on a case-by-case basis to be able to access a student loan if they encountered some rare circumstance in which they could not borrow through the standard channels. I, for one, hope that the broad-based Lender of Last Resort authority in this bill will never be used. After all, the goal of this legislation is to prevent such a crisis within the loan program before it occurs. But I appreciate the steps being taken to ensure that if the Lender of Last Resort program ever needs to be deployed on a larger scale, we will have the infrastructure and processes in place to allow it. However, because the program was simply never intended to be used on a school-wide basis, we should ensure that in implementing this authority, we are not unintentionally subverting current regulations.”