A Republican congressman plans to introduce a bill that would bar future presidents from cancelling student loan debt, as President Biden has been doing for the last two years. In total, the 46th president has canceled more than $175 billion in loans for nearly five million people. Just before Christmas, he approved nearly $5 billion more in loan cancellations. 

A spokeswoman for Congressman Glenn Grothman confirms to the Sun that he will introduce the Protecting Taxpayers from Student Loan Bailouts Act, which would bar the secretary of education from issuing regulations that cost taxpayers more than $100 million annually. Passage of the bill would functionally neuter any mass-cancellations that a president attempted in the future. 

During the last Congress, Mr. Grothman’s bill was rolled into a legislative package with other bills called the College Cost Reduction Act, which passed out of the House Education and Workforce Committee in 2024 but never came up for a vote in the full House. 

A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Preston Cooper, writes that it is critical that Republicans pass Mr. Grothman’s bill this year in order to prevent abuses by future presidents and secretaries of education. 

“Congress could block the Education Department from issuing new regulations or executive actions related to the student loan program that increase costs to taxpayers. Had it been in effect during the last four years, such a law would have killed all of President Biden’s attempts at loan cancellation in the cradle,” he says. 

“The Biden administration may be finished, but it’s wrong to assume that its agenda on student loan cancellation is dead forever. Congress can Democrat-proof the student loan program forever with one simple legislative change,” Mr. Cooper writes. 

Mr. Biden ran on the platform of cancelling some student loan debt in 2020, though he did not go as far as Senator Warren or Senator Sanders, who called for the complete elimination of $1.7 trillion in outstanding student debt that was on the books in 2020. Total student loan debt held by Americans has increased by about $400 billion in the last four years. 

Because the legislation deals with federal spending and regulations, it is almost certain that the Protecting Taxpayers from Student Loan Bailouts Act could be included in the Republican legislative package now being debated among House members and senators. 

For a piece of legislation to avoid the 60-vote filibuster, it must go through the process of reconciliation, which permits only spending and regulatory matters to pass on a simple majority vote. 

Mr. Biden is not yet giving up on his loan cancellation bonanza. On December 20, he announced the cancellation of nearly $5 billion in loans for government employees such as teachers and law enforcement officers. 

Democrats and loan cancellation activists have called on the White House to run through the tape, cancelling even more debt before departing Washington in less than two weeks. In early December, Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Senator Durbin urged the president to deliver debt relief to hundreds of thousands of students who attended for-profit colleges.