This Spinsanity item debunks a Dean charge that President George W Bush kicked 84k students off the Pell Grant program. What happened was that in 1992, under President George HW Bush, the current president's father, a law was passed to annually update certain state tax data that's used to determine eligibility for Pell Grants.
The Clinton administration never implemented the law, though they did not have any legal right to do so. With the new administration coming in, they decided to end this illegal defiance and did an update from the 1988 (!) data that had been used to that point. Accumulated changes meant that the old inaccurate formulas gave roughly 84k students who shouldn't have had Pell grants participate in the program. Dean called the entire affair the consequences of Bush tax policy. In a way, he's right. He's just got the wrong Bush.
Posted by TMLutas at January 28, 2004 02:29 PM