Senate Republicans Move to Block Biden Administration from Unlawfully Canceling Student-Loan Debt

Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah), alongside Senators Bill Cassidy (R., La.), Tim Scott (R., S.C.), and Thom Tillis (R., N.C.), introduced a bill Wednesday that would prohibit the Biden administration from continuing its unlawful student-debt cancellations.

The Student Loan Accountability Act, initially introduced in May 2022, comes on the heels of an announcement that the Department of Education will send an email Wednesday to 25 million Americans with student-loan debt that lays out options for both full and partial cancellation.

“Not only are the Biden administration’s student loan cancellation schemes morally questionable — forcing hardworking Americans who have already repaid their loans or decided to pursue alternative education paths to foot others’ bills — these policies are wildly inflationary, fiscally reckless, and do nothing to actually address the real problem of increasing higher education costs,” Romney said in a statement.

If enacted, the bill would bar the Education, Justice, and Treasury Departments from moving to forgive or wipe out outstanding balances of covered loans. The legislation does, however, include exceptions for existing programs under the Higher Education Act like forgiveness for teachers and those working in fields related to public service.

Tillis stressed in a statement that forgiving debt does not solve the problems attached to ballooning college and university tuition, insisting that “we must address the root causes” rather than subsidizing a bad system.

The other two Republican senators who introduced the bill stressed the political nature of the Biden administration’s rhetoric and action on student loans — especially given the fact that the United States Supreme Court ruled an earlier plan unconstitutional — and derided the repeated swings at canceling student debt as electoral gamesmanship.

“The Biden-Harris student loan forgiveness schemes do not ‘forgive debt,'” Cassidy said in a statement. “They transfer the burden from those who willingly took out the loans onto Americans who chose not to go to college or already sacrificed to pay off their loans. These schemes are nothing more than an attempt to buy votes before an election at the expense of taxpayers.”

Scott agreed, describing the plan as “political pandering” on the White House’s part that “continues to harm the exact people they are claiming to help.”

Representative Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee, slammed the Biden administration’s repeated passes at student-loan forgiveness in a statement to National Review.

“I didn’t think this administration could get any more devious or stoop any lower,” Foxx said. “The Biden-Harris administration continues to dangle ‘loan forgiveness’ in front of millions of borrowers across the nation. This is just another illegal scheme intended to buy votes in November, and it will do nothing to address the student loan disaster that Biden-Harris has exacerbated. Overpromising and underdelivering is an undeniable hallmark of this administration. Bottom line, the Biden-Harris administration is using students and borrowers as political pawns knowing its actions are illegal because it cares more about winning elections than helping borrowers.”

Foxx previously spoke with NR about a different option: Holding colleges and universities accountable for unpaid student-loan debt through the College Cost Reduction Act, which Foxx introduced in January of this year.

“What we’re doing is offering a solution there, while they’re just using a Band-Aid,” she told NR at the time. “This bill looks at the problems from a comprehensive point of view: Costs keep going up, debt goes up along with it, completion rates aren’t going up, and students are worse off.”