Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Sarah Parshall Perry.
Day after day, new data surfaces to expose yet another way the Biden administration lied to the public. We now know, for example, that millions of student loan borrowers were seriously delinquent on their debts, but former-president Biden’s Department of Education purposely hid this information until after the November election.
This was part of the Democrat’s unconstitutional push to “forgive” student loans—euphemism for taxpayers bailing out borrowers. As we wrote last year, the courts repeatedly struck down these schemes, which were little more than attempts to buy young people’s votes.
Yet even after the courts forced the Biden administration to restart student loan payments, the administration simply came up with new workarounds to sidestep the law. One of these was to appease the courts by technically requiring borrowers make payments but then also removing—or at least delaying—any consequences for failing to pay.
This was accomplished by keeping under wraps how many borrowers were in default on their student loans. For the last year of the Biden administration, data on delinquencies was not made available to credit bureaus, so millions of borrowers made no payments, and their credit reports remained immaculate.
As proof of their malicious compliance, the Department of Education even advertised to borrowers that failure to make payments would not be reported to credit bureaus.
With official data of loan nonperformance (defaults and delinquencies) on federal student loans being kept hidden, the only data available to the public indicated that over 99 percent of student loans were being paid and a mere fraction of 1 percent of borrowers were behind. The reality was vastly different.
With President Trump’s Department of Education honestly reporting the data, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Equifax have confirmed that millions of student loans were seriously delinquent during the last year of the Biden administration, but this information was purposely hidden from taxpayers and voters.
As of the first quarter of 2025, nearly 8 percent of aggregate student loan debt now has payments over 90 days late, compared to the half of 1 percent that was previously disclosed. The rate of serious delinquencies is literally over 1,000 percent (7.2 percentage points) worse than the Department of Education claimed, and the worst in five years.
What’s even more troubling is that these delinquencies come after the Biden administration already bailed out student loan borrowers to the tune of almost $190 billion. It’s reasonable to assume that student loan nonperformance would be at a record high today if these unpaid bills hadn’t been foisted on taxpayers.
For the sake of portraying an overly rosy picture in an election year, the last Democrat administration prompted millions of borrowers to fall behind on their debt payments, using the money instead to boost consumer spending figures in the leadup to a hotly contested presidential race where the economy was center stage.
The result was taxpayers not receiving their money back in a timely manner—and now millions of people just saw their credit scores take a triple-digit hit. Worse, these delinquent borrowers will soon find themselves in the collections process.
That’s not to say taxpayers should have sympathy for these borrowers. The number of college graduates employed today is at a record high while this cohort’s unemployment rate is near a record low. They also average significantly higher lifetime earnings than their non-degreed counterparts, so it makes no sense to force lower-income families to pay for higher-income individual’s loans. If anyone is undeserving of a bailout, it’s them.
However, the culpability of borrowers is a distraction from the fact that this whole situation wouldn’t have happened but for the Biden administration’s unconstitutional attempts to defraud taxpayers in exchange for the votes of young people, all while scandalously hiding evidence from the public.
E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is a public finance economist, the Richard F. Aster fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.
Sarah Parshall Perry, J.D., is the Vice President and senior legal fellow at Defending Education.
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