The idea that borrowers have to pay back money that they’ve, well, borrowed has somehow become cause for partisan outrage. After the Department of Education announced that it would resume collection of student loans for the first time in five years, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) posted to X, “This decision is all about punishing student loan borrowers.”
Warren’s criticism makes little sense: the Trump administration paused collections at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, and the Biden administration drew it out for another four years, including nearly two years after Biden officially declared the pandemic over. But she continued, “Instead of lowering costs, Donald Trump wants to take money out of your grandma's Social Security check.” Unless grandma is directly paying for her adult grandchildren’s student loan payments (or is in the less than 10% of borrowers over the age of 50 herself), it’s not clear how or why her Social Security checks would be affected.
If anything, resuming collection of loans in default honors grandma—and her purse: as with all government programs, the federal student loan program is funded by the tax dollars of generous, hardworking Americans, including those who didn’t go to college. As Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote for the Wall Street Journal regarding the decision, “Borrowing money and failing to pay it back isn’t a victimless offense. Debt doesn’t go away; it gets transferred to others. If borrowers don’t pay their debts to the government, taxpayers do.”
The Department of Education is not doing anything more than fulfilling its obligations; anything less than what it is doing would in fact be irresponsible. Ensuring that student loan borrowers are held accountable for paying their money back is crucial in upholding any sort of social contract—which was broken by the Biden administration when it prolonged the pause on student loan collection well past the end of the pandemic and gave what was essentially false relief to borrowers without any constitutional basis.
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In 2022, Biden illegally attempted to forgive $500 billion of student debt by executive action, and his plan was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2023. Hours later, his Department of Education, led by then-Secretary Miguel Cardona, announced what was effectively another loan forgiveness program by a different name. It was partially blocked in 2024 by the 8th Circuit and fully blocked in February 2025. In his opinion regarding the final decision, Judge L. Steven Grasz wrote, “The power Congress gave the [Secretary of Education] to create repayment plans…means the Secretary must design [income-contingent repayment] plans leading to actual repayment of the loans. The Secretary [Cardona] has gone well beyond this authority by designing a plan where loans are largely forgiven rather than repaid.” Even on his way out of office in January of 2025, Biden forgave even more loans, totaling over $180 billion for over 5 million borrowers during his four years in office.
Per the Brookings Institution, wealthy borrowers were the greatest beneficiaries of Biden’s forgiveness. Because they tend to borrow more for more education that generally results in higher salaries, those with the highest income got the most out of Biden’s plan, even though the plan applied to lower-income groups as well. Meanwhile, all taxpayers—including those who didn’t even go to college (perhaps because they felt they could not afford to pay back such hefty loans)—of all income levels wound up on the hook for the wealthy borrowers who took advantage of the Biden years. In attempting to solve inequality, the Biden administration arguably worsened it.
That doesn’t mean the student loan program is beyond reproach: the entire system is unfair to borrowers and lenders alike; and with so many in default, it is clearly unsustainable, if not predatory. The mistake liberals make, however, is assuming that fixing the program means blanket forgiving loans, rather than reforming the program in the first place so that there isn’t a federal gravy train that incentivizes colleges to hike up tuition prices and hand out what are often worthless degrees to people who can’t even get enough out of their educations to be able to pay their debts back.
Even debt relief is possible if the right people—or rather institutions—pay for it. Independent Women Senior Policy and Legal Analyst Inez Stepman, for instance, has proposed that “instead of asking the mechanic without a four-year degree to pay the check [for student loan forgiveness],” it should be paid for “by raising the tax on university endowments…and closing loopholes around other university moneymaking enterprises.”
But, in the meantime, unless and until such reform takes place, the Department of Education is adding tools to its website and weekend hours to its Federal Student Aid call center to help borrowers pay back what they owe.
Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst and engagement coordinator at Independent Women (iwf.org).
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