A top Republican slams Biden's latest student-loan relief, saying he 'operates as if he can issue any decree he wants' on debt forgiveness

Rep. Virginia Foxx
GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx has criticized Biden's plans to forgive student debt broadly.Al Drago/CQ Roll Call
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  • Biden recently wiped out $5.8 billion in student debt for defrauded Corinthian Colleges students.

  • GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx slammed the relief, saying Biden is "exercising authority that he does not have."

  • Foxx has long criticized plans to forgive student debt broadly, citing its cost to taxpayers.

A top Republican lawmaker was quick to criticize President Joe Biden's latest relief for defrauded student-loan borrowers.

After Biden's Education Department announced all former students of the now-defunct for-profit Corinthian Colleges will be getting their remaining $5.8 billion in student debt wiped out, Rep. Virginia Foxx — leading Republican on the House education committee — said in a statement the relief "does nothing to solve the problems in higher education and exacerbates the economic disaster fueled by the President's lack of fiscal responsibility."

"Time and again, President Biden operates as if he can issue any decree he wants on student loan forgiveness, even if it means exercising authority that he does not have," Foxx said. "Students deserve to be protected from bad actor institutions. But instead of cherry-picking institutions as scapegoats to justify the billions in taxpayer dollars he's spending on student loan forgiveness, President Biden should work with Republicans to reform the Higher Education Act to hold all schools accountable for their outcomes."

The relief Foxx slammed was the biggest action the Education Department has taken to date for students defrauded by for-profit schools. It provided nearly $6 billion in relief for 560,000 borrowers, and it was a group discharge, meaning the relief would go to former students who didn't submit claims themselves. It also builds on the targeted relief the department has been enacting since Biden took office — along with defrauded students, borrowers with disabilities and public servants have also seen some student-debt cancellation from newly implemented reforms.

But Foxx, and her Republican colleagues, have long criticized student-loan forgiveness, and they've grown increasingly vocal against relief as Biden is inching closer to making a decision on debt forgiveness for all federal borrowers. Foxx has argued in that past that wiping out debt widescale would cost taxpayers and exacerbate inflation, while GOP Sens. Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton have called the policy a ploy for Democrats to win votes at the midterms.

But some Democratic lawmakers are worried Biden's potential plan to forgive $10,000 in student debt per borrower — subject to income caps — is not enough. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter last week that $10,000 "relieves most the people who owe the least. What relief is there for the most desperate? For them, interest will undo that 10k fast. We can do better."

Biden has yet to announce a final decision on relief, and Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal told Insider on Thursday that he is "looking at a variety of options" to carry out broad student-loan forgiveness.

Read the original article on Business Insider