Pallone Opening Remarks at Subcommittee Markup of the SCORE Act

Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) delivered the following opening remarks at a Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee markup of H.R. 4312, the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Enforcement (SCORE) Act:

With all due respect to my colleagues, I do not think this markup is a good use of this Subcommittee’s time. We in Congress should be focused on the very real threats to our nation’s colleges and universities as well as everyday Americans under the Trump Administration. 

A day rarely goes by when the Trump Administration is not attacking colleges and universities. Trump continues to destroy America’s higher education system with reduced federal research dollars, taxes on endowments, and cuts to federal student aid. His latest effort to interfere with college accreditation is particularly outrageous.   

Let’s be clear, the fundamental threat to colleges and universities is not college athletes finally being able to profit from their talent.  

The real threat to our nation’s colleges and universities is coming from inside the White House, starting with the Trump Administration’s attempts to cut billions in research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This has left colleges and universities across the country scrambling to figure out how they are going to continue their lifesaving research on cancer, heart disease, children’s health, and more.  

These cuts, as well as reductions in graduate student funding included in President Trump’s Big Ugly Bill are forcing colleges and universities to wrestle with how to fund their graduate research and science programs, which endangers our nation’s global leadership in science and medical research for generations to come.

These are major crises, yet Republicans are ignoring them and instead would rather talk about college sports.  

We have held countless hearings about college sports over the last few years. In every hearing, we have heard that for decades the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) failed to put the health, safety, and financial interests of college athletes first. Every witness has said that allowing college athletes to profit from their Name, Image, and Likeness is a good thing and represents a long overdue change in college sports. Changing the rules so that college athletes can finally profit from their Name, Image, and Likeness was a hard-fought victory won by college athletes, not by Congressional action but through the courts and the state legislatures.  

Last month a federal court approved a historic settlement in House v. NCAA in which the NCAA agreed, for the first time, to allow schools to pay college athletes directly for the talent those athletes bring to their schools, the conferences, and the NCAA. Those payments are subject to a salary cap of $20.5 million per school.  

Instead of celebrating progress made by college athletes, the SCORE Act shuts down their ability to seek additional protection in the courts and state legislatures. It even gives the NCAA and conferences unchecked authority to roll back many of the hard fought benefits college athletes have won in the courts and state legislatures. The bill reduces the amount of money college athletes can make from their talent but allows schools to spend unlimited amounts of money on coaches, trainers, fancy athletic facilities, private planes for team travel, and other inducements to help recruit and retain the most talented college athletes. This is not how you “level the playing field.”

The SCORE Act also gives the NCAA nearly limitless and unchecked authority to govern every aspect of college athletics, including, how college athletes can get paid, what happens when they want to transfer schools more than once, and how many hours they can spend training, traveling to competitions and competing.  

Rather than offering college athletes new, strong, enforceable protections, the SCORE Act offers window dressing to address health and safety concerns and purposefully eliminates the ability of college athletes and law enforcement authorities to enforce violations of even those weak protections.  

The bill also fails to include meaningful protections to help ensure college athletes don’t hire predatory agents, and it doesn’t provide pathways to relief if they do. Instead, it simply allows the NCAA and conferences to require agents to register with those institutions. That will do nothing to help college athletes and could create a false sense of security regarding the integrity of registered agents.

We should not be doing anything that stifles the progress being won by the college athlete. The landscape of modern college sports is well on its way to being developed by these recent court decisions and Congress should allow that work to play out. Don't get in the way.

College sports and the opportunities it provides for young athletes cannot exist, though, and I want to emphasize that, cannot exist without colleges. If President Trump succeeds in destroying the American college and university system, which he seems determined to do, there will be no college sports.

I don't know if anyone realizes that, but you have to have a college to have college sports. And the way we're going with this administration, I don't even know if there are going to be any colleges or universities or any worth fighting for once he destroys them.

So with that,I yield back the balance of my time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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