U.S. Education Secretary Cardona attacks Republicans in official letter to millions of people with student loans.
By Frederick M. Hess and Michael Brickman
Following the failed attempt on former President Trump’s life, and after the Biden-Harris campaign pulled down its advertising to signal respect for the gravity of the moment, the Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, was using taxpayer-funded official communications to attack Republicans.
Seemingly intent on confirming suspicions that the Biden-Cardona scheme to “forgive” student loans is a bald attempt to buy votes with taxpayer funds, Cardona sent a Department missive to millions of borrowers that thundered, “Federal courts have issued rulings in lawsuits brought by Republican elected officials who are siding with special interests and trying to block Americans from accessing all the benefits of the most affordable student loan repayment plan in history.”
Cardona insisted, “Let me be clear: President Biden and I are determined to lower costs for student loan borrowers…no matter how many times Republican elected officials try to stop us,” before promising, “We’ll keep fighting for you!”
Where to start? Those “special interests” that Republicans are “siding with”? They’re the 90 percent of Americans who don’t owe student debt but whom Cardona is hoping to stick with the tab. Those awful court rulings? They were issued by judges who were appointed by President Obama, back when Joe Biden was Vice President. The question is not whether the federal government should be “alleviating the burden of student debt” (Congress has created several programs designed to do just that), but whether Cardona is illegally transferring obligations from the people who chose to borrow money to taxpayers who didn’t.
Moreover, this missive is not posted anywhere on the Department of Education’s website. Rather, at this point, at least, it’s eyes-only for those who stand to benefit from the Biden-Cardona scheme.
Sadly, a taste for rank partisanship has been an all-too-familiar hallmark of Cardona’s dismal tenure. In October 2021, Cardona’s team covertly worked with the National School Board Association (NSBA) to arrange for an NSBA letter that urged the FBI to start investigating parents concerned about school closures, masking mandates, and racialized curricula as “domestic terrorists.”
In 2022, Cardona’s team broke with more than two decades of careful efforts to keep the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) at arm’s length from politics, using the NAEP release as a chance to let political appointees tout Biden’s spending proposals and distribute administration talking points. He has pushed to cut funding for charter schools while denouncing Republican efforts to expand school choice as an effort to “attack our schools” and “privatize education.”
You might think that Cardona, responsible for the disastrous failure to execute the Congressionally-mandated revamp of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), would focus on quietly cleaning up that mess. At a minimum, you might think that a man who oversaw the biggest debacle in his Department’s history would be leery of impugning those who argue his Department should do only what Congress has actually empowered it to do. You’d be wrong.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, put it well, telling us:
I have been disappointed in this administration’s messaging, but this level of partisanship has managed to surprise me. At a time when it’s crucial that we turn down the rhetoric against elected officials, I’m appalled that the Department of Education would expend time and resources to push out a campaign-style email to student loan borrowers bashing Republicans. Time would be better spent working in a bipartisan manner on urgent matters like rolling out the FAFSA and ensuring borrowers have non-partisan information that they need to repay their student loans.
Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos spent four years getting slandered as an ideologue for urging legislators to expand school choice, while Cardona has gotten kid gloves treatment even as he’s overseen the FAFSA fiasco, gotten his first student forgiveness plan shot down by the Supreme Court, stood mute while antisemitism swept college campuses, and unapologetically politicized his office.
We’ll leave it to others to determine whether Cardona’s conduct violates the Hatch Act, which requires federal officials “to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion,” but it’s safe to say that he’s provided more cause to believe that the U.S. Department of Education is not only bureaucratic, ineffectual, and wasteful—but a force for division and a perch for bad actors. For those who would abolish the Department of Education, Cardona is the gift that keeps on giving.
Originally published by the American Enterprise Institute. Republished with permission.
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