A national grassroots petition in protest of President Joe Biden’s latest student debt “forgiveness” stunt garnered over 5,000 online comments in a single night.
Biden’s newest student loan cancellation plan would shift almost $150 billion in debt from those with outstanding college loans to American taxpayers—including those who already paid off their own college loans, worked through school to reduce or negate the cost of loans, or didn’t attend college at all.
Although Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called this latest plan a “relief for today’s borrowers,” he has said nothing about the new taxation Americans would be saddled with. Cardona suggested that simply canceling agreed-upon loans would create “social mobility, economic prosperity,” and “an America that lives up to its highest ideals.”
Recognizing this wildly overt governmental overreach, estimated to cost $475 billion, Heritage Action for America made an online portal available Wednesday to give Americans an opportunity to voice their concerns to Biden’s Education Department. (Heritage Action is the grassroots partner of The Heritage Foundation, parent organization of The Daily Signal.)
Comments have flooded in since Heritage Action launched the portal, with over 5,000 comments submitted in one night.
Thad Brock, director of digital advocacy for Heritage Action, told The Daily Signal that it’s “the most rapid engagement we have seen from the grassroots on any comment portal that Heritage has launched since 2021.”
This isn’t the Biden administration’s first attempt to circumvent Congress by signing hackneyed executive orders to appeal politically to those who haven’t repaid student loans. In July 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Biden’s contrivance to use emergency funding for the Iraq War as justification for forgiving student loan debt because of COVID-19.
The high court’s 6-3 decision reiterated that the “power of the purse” resides with Congress, not the executive branch. The ruling, however, appears not to have dissuaded the president.
In February, Biden claimed during a press conference in California that the Supreme Court “didn’t stop me.”
Economists have asserted that the government’s unilateral student debt “cancellation” would do nothing to fix skyrocketing tuition rates at universities, which studies show are incredibly high in part because of the predatory federal student loan program.
As long as the incentive structure to take out federal student loans remains in place, universities and colleges will continue to increase tuition—and a new wave of student debt will replace the old just as quickly.
Regardless, the Biden administration has put forward its “SAVE Plan” as a proposed regulation shoved through by the Education Department, ignoring a congressional distinction between loans and grants in the Higher Education Act to shift the voluntary debt of over 30 million borrowers to the rest of the nation’s tax burden. This is estimated to cost $475 billion over the next 10 years.
Heritage Action’s portal will remain open for comments on Biden’s latest plan to “forgive” student debt until May 17, the federal deadline.