Student Debt Cancellation Should Be Repealed

The House of Representatives will vote today on a joint resolution disapproving the President’s August 2022 student loan cancellation plan and repayment pause. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that disapproving the rule would reduce deficits by $316 billion through 2033. It would also prevent the Administration from further pausing student loan repayments, which could otherwise cost $5 billion per month, and also prevent any other unilateral debt cancellation plan.

The debt cancellation plan in question is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court of the United States after being ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. district court.

The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

The President should not be allowed to unilaterally add hundreds of billions of dollars to the debt. Given our current fiscal and economic situation, it is astounding the Administration still wants to. 

This resolution would rightly exert Congress’s authority over the power of the purse while cancelling a policy that is costly, inflationary, regressive, economically unjustified, and harmful to the higher education system.

There is much work to be done to ensure we have an affordable and high-quality higher education system. But instead of taking unilateral executive orders that do nothing to solve the problem, the President should sit down with lawmakers and find a bipartisan path forward that truly reforms the system.

With inflation high, interest rates rising, and debt approaching record levels, we shouldn’t just throw hundreds of billions of dollars at every problem rather than doing the hard work to fix it.

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For more information, please contact Kim McIntyre, Director of Media Relations, at mcintyre@crfb.org.