Betsy DeVos, education secretary under former President Donald Trump, told Newsmax that President Joe Biden is trying to buy votes through student loan forgiveness.
Joining "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE" on Thursday, DeVos explained that Biden was looking for new ways to enact the debt relief after the Supreme Court struck down his original plan late last month.
"I think more and more Americans are becoming aware of exactly what he's trying to do. And the attempt was a failure and a flop per the Supreme Court's decision," DeVos stated.
However, she continued, Biden is now "trying to find another way around it through income-driven repayment [IDR] plan revisions which, again, would just be an illegal transfer of funds from the backs of students who willingly took the loans out to Americans who never did take the loans out."
The Department of Education first laid out the proposed IDR plan changes in January before revising them last week to provide 804,000 borrowers with $39 billion in automatic loan forgiveness.
Currently, four IDR plans are available for lower-income earners that cap monthly payments at around 10% or 20% of discretionary household income, according to CNBC.
The Biden administration's revisions would create a new plan capped at 5% and erase existing payments for borrowers who make regular payments for around 20 to 25 years.
"It's not the way to address what is, we acknowledge, a problem — the runaway cost of higher education," DeVos said. "But President Biden had best get serious about serious and legal solutions to actually addressing this issue."
Biden's original plan, now tabled by the high court, would have provided up to $10,000 in student debt cancellation for regular borrowers, and up to $20,000 in cancellation for Pell Grant recipients.
Borrowers would have been eligible if their individual income was less than $125,000 or their combined married income was less than $250,000. No one in the top 5% of earners would have been eligible.
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