A wide-ranging group of 130 Republicans in Congress is demanding the Biden administration withdraw $147 billion in “reckless” student-loan bailouts approved last month.
The GOPers — ranging from the moderate Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) to the far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) — urged President Biden’s Education Department in a letter Friday to nix the bailout, which would provide even greater student debt relief than an earlier attempt struck down by the US Supreme Court.
“This is even broader than the Department’s first attempt: at an estimated price tag of $147 billion, taxpayers are being forced to take on the debt of nearly 28 million borrowers,” wrote the lawmakers, led by House Education and Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (NC) and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee ranking member Bill Cassidy (La.).
“In addition to the fiscally irresponsible nature of this backdoor attempt to enact ‘free’ college, the administration continues to use borrowers as political pawns knowing full well these proposed actions are illegal,” said Foxx (R-NC), Cassidy (R-La.) and the others.
Senate Republican conference Chairman John Barasso (Wyo.) and House GOP conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (NY) were also co-signatories.
In June 2023, the nation’s top court struck down Biden’s bid to cancel $430 billion in student loans, which the administration argued was legal thanks to a 2003 law designed for military veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
So since then, the Education Department has adopted a piecemeal approach to writing off much of that debt based on the Higher Education Act of 1965.
But the Republicans argued in their missive, “The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that there is zero authority to write-off federal student loans en masse last June when the Department’s ‘Plan A’ was ruled unconstitutional.
” ‘Plan B’ hinges on creating these extensive regulations based on scant statutory text written in 1965.
“This statute has no history of broad use by any previous Secretary and was previously deemed by this administration as less likely to hold up in court than ‘Plan A,’ ” they added.
Biden, 81, pledged in his 2020 presidential campaign to forgive portions of federally held student loan debt.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has said the administration is “unapologetic” about its “commitment to provide relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible.”
This year, in the run-up to the November election, the president and Vice President Kamala Harris have visited key swing states to tout their administration’s efforts to cancel the debt — a move Republicans have slammed as “buying votes.“
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the president’s latest debt cancellation move — plus others he has already made — could up the cost of his student loan forgiveness to a total of between $870 billion and $1.4 trillion.
Of that price tag, $620 billion has already been cancelled through various programs, including Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan and other targeted debt discharges.
SAVE is an income-driven repayment plan — but will forgive up to $25,000 in debt on average for households earning more than $312,000 in annual income, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.
The Education Department did not respond to a Post request for comment Monday.
