As president, Joe Biden tried his best to forgive and forget student loan debt. He was stymied at every turn by federal courts, both liberal and conservative jurisdictions, who determined that Biden simply didn’t have the power to do what he was trying to do.
Of course, since it was such a “good cause,” the left didn’t mind that Biden was stretching the Constitution to get the job done. Only left-approved causes are eligible to bend the rules.
The Trump administration is finally righting the ship and will begin collection actions once again on student loan borrowers who are in default.
“American taxpayers will no longer be forced to serve as collateral for irresponsible student loan policies,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a press release. “The Biden Administration misled borrowers: the executive branch does not have the constitutional authority to wipe debt away, nor do the loan balances simply disappear.”
What made these actions more insidious was that Biden was hoping to “run out the clock” on the collection process, hoping that a federal judge would look at the mess he made of debt collection and simply declare the debt forgiven. Fortunately, he failed.
Donald Trump has already taken several steps to reverse the Biden student loan madness. He’s canceled an income-driven repayment program and replaced it with one a let less generous. Trump also signed an executive order that prevented borrowers who work for organizations that are looking to undermine federal policy from “being eligible for public service loan forgiveness,” such as those “aiding or abetting violations of… Federal immigration laws.”
Now, the White House announced that the administration will garnish wages, pensions, and tax refunds from delinquent borrowers.
“The government can and will collect defaulted federal student loan debt by withholding money from borrowers, tax refunds, federal pensions and even their wages,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
The Department of Education on Monday said it would resume collections on defaulted federal student loans in May for the first time since 2020. The student loan portfolio is nearly $1.6 trillion, Leavitt said, with fewer than four out of ten borrowers up to speed with their loans.
Altogether, the official said that there are 4 million borrowers who are in the late-stage delinquency stage on payments, meaning that they are between 91 days and 180 days late on payments.
“This is unsustainable, unfair and a huge liability for American taxpayers. Debt cannot be wiped away. It just ends up getting transferred to others,” she said. “So why should Americans who didn’t go to college, or went to college and responsibly paid back their loans, pay for the student loans of other Americans? The Trump administration will never force taxpayers to pay student loan debts that don’t belong to them.”
“We must get our fiscal house in order and restore common sense to our country,” Leavitt said. “If you take out a loan, you have to pay it back. It’s very simple. President Trump will not kick the can down the road anymore.”
That’s the long and short of it. I honestly feel for those borrowers who believed the President of the United States, Joe Biden, and had faith that they’d never have to pay another dime toward their student loans. Why shouldn’t they have believed him? He was the president, after all.
The damage that man did will echo for decades.
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