“Vanquishing Washington’s bloated education bureaucracy will be a knock-down drag-out fight that Ms. McMahon may be well-suited for”
The Biden Administration has effectively turned the Education Department into an arm of the teachers unions and cultural left. Ms. McMahon’s top priorities will be ending student loan write-offs, rolling back the department’s Title IX regulation, devolving school control to the states and promoting alternative education pathways.
Start with stanching red ink in the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program. The Biden team has unilaterally canceled more than $175 billion in debt, which doesn’t include the cost of its pandemic forbearance and SAVE plan. The latter eliminates payments for four million borrowers and reduces them for others by hundreds of dollars a month.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 25% of student debt disbursed over the next decade will be written off mainly because of the SAVE and Obama income-based repayment plans. While federal courts have put the SAVE plan on hold, the Biden team has suspended required payments for eight million borrowers already enrolled.
Scrapping the SAVE plan and requiring borrowers to resume making payments will no doubt provoke an outcry on the left. But the free lunch can’t continue forever, and it’s unfair to Americans who didn’t attend college or repaid their loans. More young Americans are deciding college isn’t worth it, and why should they have to subsidize degrees in community organizing?
