[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 89 (Wednesday, May 22, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3822-S3823]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Student Loan Debt

  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, last month, President Biden announced yet 
another student loan giveaway. Among other things, this latest scheme 
would waive accrued and capitalized interest for certain borrowers and, 
staggeringly, provide significant loan forgiveness for three-quarters 
of a million borrowers with an average household income--get this--of 
$312,976.
  That is right. President Biden's latest reckless expenditure of 
taxpayer dollars would go, in part, to providing loan forgiveness to 
three-quarters of a million borrowers with an average household income 
above $300,000.
  All told, the President's latest student loan giveaway will cost 
nearly $150 billion. That is on top of the $475 billion in loan 
forgiveness the President announced last summer.
  That scheme, which the administration dubbed the Saving on a Valuable 
Education Plan, will implement de facto loan forgiveness on a massive 
scale by creating a system in which the majority of future Federal 
borrowers will never fully repay their student loans.
  The Department of Education estimated that borrowers with only 
undergraduate debt enrolled in the SAVE Program can, on average, expect 
to pay back just $6,121 for each $10,000 that they borrow. That amounts 
to the Federal Government taking on, on average, almost 40 percent of 
the cost of these borrowers' student loans.
  There are so many problems with the President's plan it is difficult 
to even know where to begin.
  First, there is the staggering cost of these and other Biden 
administration student loan programs. The Committee for a Responsible 
Federal Budget,

[[Page S3823]]

where the President's own Treasury Secretary used to sit on the board, 
had this to say:

       Including the Biden administration's new student debt 
     cancellation plan, we estimate all recent student debt 
     cancellation policies will cost a combined $870 billion to 
     $1.4 trillion. That's more than all federal spending on 
     higher education over the nation's entire history.

  That, again, is a quote from the Committee for a Responsible Federal 
Budget.
  Let me just repeat that last line:

       That's more than all federal spending on higher education 
     over the nation's entire history.

  And ``the vast majority of this debt cancellation,'' the committee 
goes on, ``was put in place through executive actions under President 
Biden.''
  So the staggering cost of President Biden's giveaways is one major 
problem, especially when you consider another major problem, which is 
that the President's giveaways will do nothing to fix the actual 
problem, which is the cost of higher education. In fact, they could 
very well make things worse.
  For one, there is reason to fear that his student loan giveaways 
could actually encourage colleges to raise their prices. And, of 
course, the President's giveaways will do nothing to encourage students 
to only borrow what they can afford. Indeed, there is a good chance 
students will increase their borrowing as a result of the President's 
plans.

  President Biden's student loan schemes will cost a massive amount of 
money, while doing nothing to solve higher education costs.
  But the problems don't end there. To start with, there is the 
question of whether or not what the President is doing is even lawful. 
Last summer, the Supreme Court struck down the President's original 
student loan forgiveness plan because the President lacked the 
statutory authority to forgive student loans, and there is reason to 
wonder whether his SAVE Plan or these latest measures could be struck 
down in the courts as well.
  Of course, on top of all of these issues, there is also the 
fundamental issue, and that is the unfairness of asking taxpayers who 
never went to college or worked hard to pay off the full balance of 
their student loans or who worked their way through school to avoid a 
heavy loan burden or who covered the costs of their education by 
enlisting in the military and risking their lives for their country to 
shoulder the massive cost of all this loan forgiveness. Why should 
someone who never went to college be taking on the burden of loan 
forgiveness for borrowers making in excess of $300,000 a year?
  Then, of course, there is the troubling message sent to students when 
we teach them that they can expect to be bailed out for the debt they 
take on, even though they agreed to repay it.
  I could go on.
  The President announced his first student loan forgiveness scheme 2 
months before the 2022 congressional elections. I don't think there is 
a coincidence about that, and I suspect it is no coincidence that he 
expects to implement his latest student loan giveaway this fall before 
the 2024 election.
  Last week, I joined Senator Cassidy and Congresswoman Foxx on a 
bicameral letter to the Secretary of Education, urging him to withdraw 
this latest plan. But, unfortunately, I suspect that the President and 
his administration won't be withdrawing anything that they think could 
win them a few votes in November. So the American people will, once 
again, have to endure yet another disastrous Biden administration 
spending plan.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Hickenlooper). The Senator from Vermont.