Trump-era Education Secretary Betsy DeVos took to Twitter to rail against President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, calling it "100% illegal."
Long critical of sweeping student debt cancellation, DeVos released a memo while serving in the Education Department that concluded President Donald Trump did not have the authority to forgive student loans, according to Insider.
Biden administration officials reached a different conclusion and announced on Wednesday that federal borrowers making less than $125,000 annually would be eligible for up to $20,000 in student loan forgiveness.
While Democrat lawmakers and student debt activists hailed the relief as the beginning of solving the $1.7 trillion student loan situation, DeVos said the move was "unfair to everyone who paid their loan or never took one out."
"This doesn't fix anything," she tweeted Wednesday. "College tuition will keep rising, and students will keep taking on debt."
Insider reports that in June, DeVos said borrowers have "a lot of tools" available to them to pay off student debt and expressed hope that Biden would "follow the law" and opt not to forgive any of it.
The day before Biden's announcement, the Office of the General Counsel within the Education Department released a memo describing DeVos' conclusions as "substantively incorrect." According to Biden education officials, the president has the authority to erase student debt in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic under the HEROES Act of 2003.
The legality of student loan forgiveness has been a subject of debate for some time. Insider reports that redacted documents made public in October show that Biden's Education Department penned a memo on the legality of student debt cancellation but did not release it publicly. And not long after Biden took office, he expressed doubt that he had the authority to cancel larger amounts of student loan debt, such as $50,000.
Democrat lawmakers have maintained that Biden can forgive some or all federal student loans through executive order and have said that they will continue to press the president for more debt relief.
"This is an important first step to provide critical relief to millions of working people struggling to make ends meet under the burden of their debt," Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat, tweeted. "It also can't be the end of this discussion.
"There are millions more who have so much debt that even $20,000 only puts a small dent in what they owe. We won't stop fighting until we cancel every dollar of student debt for every American."