President Biden’s student loan debt cancellation will cost more than the federal government has spent on higher education in the entire country’s history, a stunning report says.

Including Mr. Biden’s latest loan forgiveness plans, the student debt cancellation policies will cost $870 billion to $1.4 trillion, a fiscal watchdog group, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, estimates. The soaring costs are mostly a result of Mr. Biden’s executive actions, the group notes, which he is pursuing despite an earlier attempt being blocked by the Supreme Court.

Mr. Biden first announced his latest plan during a speech in Wisconsin earlier this month, and he was promptly met with lawsuits from a slew of Republican states. 

In a proposal the Education Secretary says will create an “America that lives up to its highest ideals,” the Biden administration recently unveiled details of its plan to cancel the debt of more than 25 million borrowers, forgive debts of millions of borrowers who entered repayment more than two decades ago, and eliminate debt for students who attended schools that  “failed to provide sufficient value,” as the Sun reported.

The Education Department is also working on a plan to authorize loan forgiveness for borrowers who are at a “high risk of future default” or those facing financial hardships such as medical expenses. 

Those new proposals will cost $250 to $750 billion, the watchdog group estimates, on top of the $620 billion in debt cancellation already implemented. 

The total $870 billion to $1.4 trillion cost estimate is more than “all historic spending on higher education prior to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report notes, as federal spending from 1962 to 2019 was $744 billion.

The loan forgiveness plans will also cost more than all projected education appropriations over the next decade and more than the total cost of tripling the current Pell grant program. The loan forgiveness also is more expensive than “the federal cost of offering universal pre-K and universal affordable child care.”

Most of the policies have “not only been costly, but also inflationary, poorly targeted, counter to the mission of lowering college costs, and not financially justified,” the report notes. “Instead of continuing down this road, lawmakers should work together on reforms that actually fix the student loan program and address the cost and quality of higher education.”