Cooked Goose, Silent Gander

How the Budget Bill Targets Learning—and Leaves a Smell

“No one is truly free unless they are educated.”
—Epictetus

Greetings, my brave defenders,

Happy Monday, and welcome to the tea table—whether this is your first time here or you are kin visiting from near and far, we welcome you back. However you've found your way here, you are celebrated—and seen. Pull out a chair, or settle down in the grass, and enjoy a cup of courage among friends. Here, you are valued for who you are, and we give you hope and encouragement to grow into more—what you might still yet become.

🎓 Knowledge is Power—and They Know It

I learned so much in the journey to achieve my education, a journey I might add that continues today, and will my whole life. Each new step in that journey brought both hardship and triumph. I have always loved knowledge and learning and was blessed with quick reading abilities and a memory, that allows me to recall entire pages like pictures in my head.

That makes me what our opposition fears most: a fully informed audience.

See, the solutions they promise—when they can be cornered into a promise—are lies. And as soon as you possess the knowledge to recognize their distorted half-truths, you become dangerous. You become someone to be feared. Silenced. Deported, perhaps, as they’ve become so apt to do of late.

Today’s piece focuses on how this war is being waged not with sound bites, but with legislation—mind-numbingly dull on its surface, but devastating in its design. The latest budget bill doesn’t just target trans citizens and immigrants—it goes after all our children and attacks their futures. Their ability to fight back. These impacts will not affect their children who go to largely private schools funded with parent and alumni donations. It will affect your kids, the ones working and scraping for every scholarship dollar.

Lets dig into how exactly as only Lady LiberTea can.

🧾 Pell Grant Changes: A Quiet Betrayal

First, for those who don’t know: Pell Grants are awarded to students identified as having high financial need. Any changes to this system disproportionately impact working-class Americans.

While the Budget does provide additional funding which covers the current short fall, it also puts into place new restrictions—namely, disqualification based on high Student Aid Index (SAI) and when federal aid doesn’t fully cover attendance costs.

That language sounds strange so to simplify, if you’re a working parent juggling two jobs, and your federal aid falls short, this program used to cover the gap. Starting in 2026, it won’t for far too many. That means every parent sending their first child to college this year may find the second one has a much harder path.

They’re quick to tell women to have children. But helping educate them? That would be asking too much

While they were kind enough to provide funds for a new Workforce Pell Grant program, the strict completion and high placement rates mean that this will be limited in size and scale, a token demonstration of solidarity not one that will help provide meaningful flexibility to students for whom college may not be the best fit and who might be happier working in a needed sector.

🪞 Transparency for Thee, Not for Me

When I was four or five—I was small, forgive the fuzziness—I remember my mother saying, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” It was one of the first times I heard it but not the last as it is one of her patent phrases that has stuck with me long after I was too big to cuddle into her lap.

Apparently, Congress disagrees

While tightening eligibility for Pell Grants, they’ve also delayed key 2023 transparency rules until 2035—rules meant to protect students from predatory career programs with high debt and low wages.

Transparency is good for you, they say. But for us? Check back in a decade.

Mama would not approve.

💸 Student Debt: Jello or Oatmeal?

If making college harder to access wasn’t enough, this budget also guts federal student aid programs, saddling people paying back loans with additional burdens.

This bill ends all current income driven assistance programs and replaces them with significantly worse options. Need a visual, picture someone replaced your typical high school lunch, the square pizza, boiled veggies and milk, with your choice: hospital jello or prison oatmeal. Yummy.

Hospital Jello: a standard repayment plan, fixed payments over 10 to 25 years based on the principle owed, with interest rates that would make a homebuyer faint.

Prison Oatmeal, a Repayment Assistance plan trapping students into 30 years of payments, increasing their current payments across all income levels, even those below the poverty line.

There use to be safeguards in place that helped students who needed it most. Students with economic hardships or who were unemployed could defer—though your loans would still be accruing interest. I myself have used such deferments. These are now gone.

And just like with Pell rules, borrower protections meant to prevent predatory for-profit schools have been… delayed. Until 2035. I see a pattern forming: Cook the goose, let the gander squawk.

🎯 Hitting the Books—With a Budget Axe

Some institutions have stood tall, fighting for their students and preserving freedom of thought. This bill punishes them.

It raises excise taxes on endowments—anywhere from 1.4% to 8%—choking scholarship funding and increasing tuition—already at soaring highs.

While that might not impact the children of the wealthy who were already buying their students placement and higher test scores at institutions of higher learning, it will certainly make it harder for your children to attend college, and successively harder for each child you send.

Beginning July 1, 2026, colleges will lose federal aid for any program where graduates’ median earnings fall below the state median. Sounds fair—until you realize this disproportionately hits arts, education, and social work programs, things we currently could use more of.

I smell goose cooking friends. For those who have never marinated and cooked a goose—the smell is honest to goodness the worst thing imaginable, having survived the experience albeit with singed nose hairs.

Just like that scent the odious bills reeks of legislation used as penalty. Schools might be forced to choose between programing for the arts, social work, nursing, and other less lucrative job sectors, simply to preserve their funding for for their other departments.

Got a dreamer in your home who wants to be a teacher, nurse, or writer? Their options are about to shrink.

🧠 A War on Higher Needs

Its important to remember that this is also not happening in a vacuum. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is pretty clear, you can’t achieve higher learning if your basic physical needs go unmet. The same regime slashing education is also gutting health coverage and food assistance—all to continue tax cuts for the wealthy.

And here is the bow of twine wrapped around this package looking just like a car ran over it: these new regulations, are set to take affect in stages.

The debt repayment changes are immediate. Pell and aid eligibility rules? 2026. There is a simple purpose for that, friends, they intend to lie and obfuscate themselves out of responsibility for the problems they caused. It is increasingly looking like they will loose seats in coming elections—potentially enough to loose control of the house, maybe the senate though I wouldn’t get hold your breathe just yet.

Staging the release like this is messaging sleight of hand. They can say “Look! We fixed it!” now—while setting a ticking bomb to go off later. If they lose control of Congress, they’ll blame the aftermath on the new leadership.

It’s already part of the MAGA playbook. Our orange felon in chief brags about supporting veterans using bills Obama signed.

Facts have never stopped him before.

This is a legislative ambush waiting to happen, so lets make sure we don’t walk into it blindly.

🏺 History Knows This Tune

What can we do, you ask, when the bill is already law?

Let me ask you this: How do you feel about that glass of wine with dinner, or after work beer?

There was a time in America when you couldn’t buy it. Prohibition outlawed alcohol in the name of moral clarity. It didn’t stop drinking. It birthed organized crime—Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson—all white, all violent, all born from a policy meant to “fix” America.

The poor were fined and imprisoned. The rich made gin in bathtubs and danced in basements.

Legislating morality doesn’t clean up a country. It creates darkness and defiance.

🔧 What You Can Do

First, if you have the means to donate and give money, start now. Don’t give to the endowment funds. Endow specific scholarships at institutions you trust. Do it in the arts, in education, in areas that will be irreparably impacted by this legislation.

You don’t have much you say, then perhaps fund a community scholarship, or pool together resources and create a renewable scholarship for even one student. $500 can be life-changing. Every single dollar you can give gets them one step closer to a brighter future for them—and a brighter future for us all.

Second, knowledge is power. This topic is intentionally boring. They want your mind to wander. Don’t let them win.

If you are in higher education, if you are working with students—with those bright shining beacons of the future—start documenting those stories. Make their voices heard. These policies won’t affect the elites, already taking back doors into these schools. They will affect everyday public school Americans. Make sure everyone understands exactly who is being hurt, and who is gaining. Share this article, link below and get the knowledge out there. It might not earn you new subscribers, but it is vital

We can’t fight what we don’t understand.

Third, If there’s a college in your town, it’s your community college now. Attend their plays, buy tickets to student galleries, offer internships, ask how you can help. Show up and say, “I want to help. How can I?” They’ll find a way..

🕊 Fight Smart, Stay Soft

There are many lanes in this fight, and I hope today’s piece gave you new fuel for the journey. Because in attacking education, they attack our future. They want interchangeable cogs—not empowered citizens.

But remember: you are not alone. There are defenders in every discipline. Your work might look different—but it matters. Let’s make space for all voices. Let’s align, strategize, and fight together.

Because inalienable rights are not granted by administrations. They are not handed down by courts. They are born with us.

The Divine Right of Kings once ruled us—until it didn’t.
Prohibition once defined our morality—until we didn’t let it.

They can delay our progress. But they cannot undo our destiny.

“The mind, once enlightened, cannot again become dark.”
—Thomas Paine

Until our Next Bold Move,
~Lady LiberTea ✨🫖

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