You thought the Biden administration was done with going around Congress to reward key constituencies? Think again.
You thought the Biden administration was done with going around Congress to reward key constituencies? Think again.
P resident Biden can’t take “no” for an answer. Despite the Supreme Court’s stern reminder in Biden v. Nebraska last June that the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to make law and appropriate funds, Biden continues to push his plan to dump student-loan debt on the taxpayers.
Biden’s Department of Education has announced a new rulemaking committee to search for new ways to appease the Left’s demand for a massive student-loan-debt bailout. The administration has excluded from those discussions representatives of the group that will foot the bill for its reckless largesse — American taxpayers.
Less than a week after the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s scheme to cancel nearly a half-trillion dollars of student loans under the HEROES Act, an emergency statute passed in the wake of 9/11, the department announced that it would accomplish the same end using the “compromise and settlement” authority supposedly granted it by another law, the Higher Education Act (HEA). This new path statutorily obliges the agency to use a grueling, time-consuming regulatory process known as “negotiated rulemaking.”
One reason why the administration initially attempted its “bailout by press release” via the HEROES Act was to avoid this hurdle. Negotiated rulemaking requires a committee of individuals convened by the department to meet over a period of several months to seek consensus on proposed regulations. With members appointed to represent groups with interests affected by the relevant rulemaking, the meetings are virtual and open to the public. The first sessions will occur on October 10 and 11. The meetings will be as entertaining as watching paint dry, but that belies their importance.
The department’s appointments of negotiators to its “Student Loan Relief Committee” show that the fix is in. The 14-member committee includes four student representatives (three student-loan borrowers and one currently enrolled student), one of whom has demanded cancellation of all student debt and tweeted about the “generational trauma caused by student loans.” Other appointees include an attorney who represents student-loan borrowers and an NAACP youth director who has tweeted that $50,000 forgiven per borrower is the minimum he will accept. The balance of the committee’s voting members includes loan servicers, state officials, and representatives of nonprofit, proprietary, and public institutions of higher education — all of whom will benefit from massive student-loan forgiveness.
Notably absent from the committee’s membership are representatives of organizations that advocate for the very people who will have to pay for the bailout: taxpayers. This snub is an admission that the administration is not concerned about the cost of its debt forgiveness and doesn’t want the discussions to deal with the unfairness inherent in forcing people who never attended college or who paid off their student loans to underwrite the debts of others.
If the administration were truly interested in fair rulemaking, it would not have to look far. For instance, recent analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focused on fiscal-policy issues, shows that the president’s student-loan-debt proposals could cost taxpayers nearly $1 trillion, adding to the $33-trillion national debt and boosting inflation.
After the president announced his debt-cancellation scheme under the HEROES Act last year, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation estimated that the policy would cost an average of $2,500 for each taxpayer — highly unwelcome news to families seeking to stay a step ahead of the bills and inflation while putting their children through school. Rather than engage with these objections, the administration pretends that they don’t exist.
This is not a hallmark of good-faith negotiated rulemaking, but it’s not the first time the department’s political leadership has plugged its ears in response to grassroots concerns. This latest disrespect of the taxpayer is reminiscent of the department’s move last year to exclude from its newly formed (and now defunct) “National Parents and Families Engagement Council” any parent groups that had committed the sin of failing to be in lockstep with the administration on its education policies. In the face of a lawsuit alleging violations of federal law requiring a balance of views on such advisory groups, the department disbanded the council rather than comply with the law and add groups critical of the administration’s stance on parental rights.
Due to the immense political pressure placed on the administration by the very groups whose representatives are serving on the negotiated-rulemaking committee, there is no chance that it will voluntarily disband its “Student Loan Relief Committee.” Instead, the administration will likely bet that support from the wealthy interest groups that back its debt bailout, like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, will more than compensate for the widely dispersed taxpayer opposition across the country. The administration is making the mistake of gravely underestimating the common sense of the average American, who can identify an illegal and unfair policy when he sees one.
Rather than ignore the interests of workers who do not want to fund yet another Washington boondoggle, the administration should include on the negotiating committee a representative that offers taxpayers a voice. Or, better yet, perhaps President Biden should listen to the Supreme Court, understand that only Congress has the authority to cancel student-loan debt on a mass basis, and abandon his ill-conceived efforts to do so.
Robert S. Eitel is the president and co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI). Paul Zimmerman is policy counsel at DFI.