Former President Trump’s pick to serve as his running mate on the Republican ticket this year, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has been a staunch critic of the Biden administration’s student loan handout as part of the White House’s repeated efforts to cancel borrowers’ debt.
President Biden campaigned on forgiving student loan debt derived from undergraduate tuition at two- and four-year public universities for borrowers earning up to $125,000 a year. His administration developed the handout plan in the first year and a half of his time in office, and he announced in August 2022 that he would move to cancel $10,000 per borrower and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
Biden’s plan encountered stiff resistance from Republicans, with several states filing legal challenges and Vance joining the ranks of its vocal opponents in his 2022 U.S. Senate race against Democrat Rep. Tim Ryan in Ohio.
“Forgiving student debt is a massive windfall to the rich, to the college educated, and most of all to the corrupt university administrators of America,” Vance wrote in a post on X in April 2022. “No bailouts for a corrupt system. Republicans must fight this with every ounce of our energy and power.”
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“Thanks to Tim Ryan and Joe Biden, Ohio workers are paying off the loans of Harvard Law students. If this seems unfair and illegal, it’s because it is,” he added in an X post that August.
After his victory in the 2022 Senate race, Vance cosponsored a bill in the Senate that would have rejected the Biden administration’s regulation for implementing the student loan handout using the Congressional Review Act. Although an identical bill passed both the House and Senate, it failed to override President Biden’s veto.
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The various legal challenges to the Biden administration’s proposal eventually led to the handout plan being blocked by the Supreme Court in June 2023. However, the White House has continued its pursuit of a plan that will pass legal muster and has since issued more narrowly tailored proposals.
Vance has also looked to advance other reforms to other aspects of federal student loans, and to that end he sponsored a bill known as Domenic and Ed’s Law in May.
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The bill, backed by original cosponsors Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., and Mike Braun, R-Ind., would address an inconsistency in federal law by letting the Department of Education discharge parents’ Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL) if their child becomes totally and permanently disabled.
Under current law, parents are permitted to discharge federal student loans if their child dies, not if their child develops a total and permanent disability.
“No parent should be forced to shoulder the burden of FFEL loans while caring for their disabled child,” Vance said in a statement announcing the bill’s introduction. “Domenic Carducci, a fellow Buckeye from Steubenville, and his family deserve the relief this bipartisan legislation would provide.”
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