On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) blasted the Biden administration as the U.S. Department of Education moves forward with debt cancellation negotiations despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the plan is illegal and unconstitutional.
Tuberville joined four of his colleagues in a letter to U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, reminding him of the plan’s unconstitutionality and of the monetary burden the plan would place on millions of taxpayers who did not receive four-year degrees or who paid for their own education.
“Your choice to conveniently exclude the interests of taxpayers who paid their loans, did not take student loans, or did not attend college removes any pretenses of fairness from this panel,” Tuberville and the other senators wrote. “The 87 percent of Americans with no student loan debt have no input, instead they are left with the $400 billion projected price tag of the program—or over four times the Department of Education’s fiscal year 2023 budget.”
“We are gravely concerned that the Department is undertaking a blatant political process with a predetermined outcome to achieve one of the President’s campaign promises at all costs,” the Senators wrote.
Joining Senators Tommy Tuberville and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in introducing the letter are U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas), Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), and presidential candidate Tim Scott (R-South Carolina).
“At the rate this administration is burning through taxpayer cash and borrowing money, Americans will be paying off Biden-era economic decisions for generations,” Sen. Grassley said. “The president must shift gears and start cutting costs.”
According to information provided by Grassley’s office, the 2023 deficit of $1.7 trillion is 76 percent greater than the CBO had projected when President Joe Biden took office. Absent an accounting anomaly stemming from the Biden administration’s failed attempt to ram through its unconstitutional student debt transfer plan, the recorded deficit would have been over $2 trillion.
The Senators assert that using the regulatory process this way “not only makes a mockery of negotiated rulemaking under the [Higher Education Act] but also of the separation of powers.”
In August 2022, President Biden announced he would use his executive emergency powers to forgive billions of dollars in student loans by adding the debt to the national debt, requiring taxpayers to pay for other people’s student loans over the coming decades. In June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the President has no authority to make such an appropriation without being first passed as an act by Congress. Thus, the President’s plan was unconstitutional.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision that the President did not have that authority, the U.S. Department of Education announced its intention to pursue an “alternative path to debt relief.” The department later announced it would be holding discussions to find a workaround to the SCOTUS ruling.
As part of this process, the Department of Education assembled a 14-person panel to negotiate a new proposed rule to force taxpayers to pay for other people’s student loans. The agency’s selections excluded the 87 percent of taxpayers who have either already paid off their loans, did not take out loans, or chose not to attend college. If the Biden administration finalizes its latest student debt transfer plan, individuals belonging to those groups will incur the estimated $ 400 billion cost for other people’s student loans.
Tuberville has repeatedly warned of the dangerous impacts of the Biden administration’s student loan plan, which could cost taxpayers as much as $559 billion over the next ten years. A non-partisan student loan expert has warned the plan could cost $1 trillion.
“Left-wing activists have fundamentally shifted higher education to become a vehicle to further their political agenda — and now they’re set on [forcing]American taxpayers to pay for the overpriced indoctrination and taking athletic opportunities away from those who have worked so hard to compete,” said Tuberville.
