On Student Aid, It’s Congressional Republicans vs. DOGE

The House Committee on Education & Workforce recently drafted legislation that would cut $350 billion in student aid. The savings come mostly from increasing loan-payment requirements and making it harder to qualify for Pell Grants. As others have explained, these measures will harm the lowest-income borrowers and reduce college access. If the committee has its way, the cuts will be bundled into a reconciliation bill in which these savings would pay for tax cuts tilted heavily toward the wealthy.

In the small print, the House legislation offers some ideas to change the behavior of colleges, reducing costs and improving outcomes for both students and taxpayers. Versions of these provisions have had bipartisan support in the past, when savings were to be cycled back into helping students in need. But the context of the current efforts — paying for the Trump administration’s tax cuts — makes such support implausible. That may not matter, since reconciliation bills require only an absolute majority in both the House and the Senate, and that’s what Republicans have.

Democrats may not pose an obstacle, but another surprising roadblock to the House accountability provisions should loom large: the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Even during the Biden administration (in which both of us served), the Department of Education would have struggled to implement critical parts of the House bill. Now that DOGE has forced out half the Education Department’s staff and President Trump is looking to eviscerate it, such execution will be out of reach. In other words, today’s Republican Party has a lot of different factions, but they can’t all win: If conservative lawmakers mean for the department to implement the accountability ideas in their current proposal, they will need to confront the Trump administration.

Although college costs have declined in recent years, they remain a huge challenge for many, including those in America’s middle class. And many students attend colleges or work-force training programs that don’t prepare them for well-paying jobs. The institutions’ financial incentives are problematic: If they offer an expensive program that does not deliver for students, the students face crushing debt, taxpayers pay what students could not, and the institutions end up … fine, most of the time. At graduate schools, which now account for almost half of new loan dollars, careful research shows that unlimited lending has pushed tuition higher without comparable gains for students in degree completion or earnings. The Biden administration forcefully attacked poor performance in training programs mostly provided by for-profits, but proposed only transparency regulations to address other sectors.

The House has two notable ideas for addressing these challenges. Complex “risk-sharing” provisions would require institutions to bear the costs for a portion of loans their students can’t repay. The share would be based on the earnings of those who attended each of the institution’s programs compared to the costs of those programs. Institutions that appear to offer a good value would receive bonus payments. This policy aims to encourage colleges to improve their students’ earnings, lower their costs, or both. The bill also caps graduate loans, based on the average cost of each program. Similar to the tax credits under Obamacare, the idea is that the federal government should help pay for typical costs, not more.

Both risk sharing and graduate-school loan limits have had progressive support in the past, but the details require careful scrutiny. The risk-sharing proposal is so convoluted that, if enacted, the only clear winner may prove to be enrollment-management companies that can market pricey analytics to baffled institutions. And, together with other provisions in the bill, the loan limits could cut borrowing and access for low-income students at law and medical schools where graduates ultimately fare quite well.

No one can doubt this: These policies require a strong Department of Education. The bill requires estimates of the total lifetime tuition students pay to earn a credential, but the department has never collected this information. The bill also requires earnings information at a more granular level than is used in the College Scorecard. The Biden administration published regulations to require new data from colleges, but then delayed the due date because of pleas from colleges and errors in implementation. The Trump administration has now pushed off the deadline again. The risk-sharing proposal also depends on loan-payment details which the department only began collecting from loan servicers a few years ago, and which have never been quality-tested in the context of a high-stakes policy use like calculating penalties on schools.

Even in a fully staffed, high-functioning Education Department, wrangling data for a hulking accountability system would require a great deal of time and expertise across the department, including at Federal Student Aid and in the Office of the Undersecretary. In the decimated and demoralized agency of today, quality assurance would be impossible. If this bill is enacted, the department will inevitably make mistakes: Sanctions or loan limits won’t be set at the right levels, and when institutions contest adverse judgments with the agency and eventually in the courts, they will win. If there is any doubt a complex operation can go sideways without necessary resources, consider the mess with the new FAFSA last year.

Some of the bill’s more popular provisions have a similar problem. Building on a measure that cleared the House in 2024 with bipartisan support, the bill would expand Pell Grant eligibility to training programs as short as eight weeks. While the nation needs more job training, this provision would be a magnet for the kinds of for-profit providers that in the past produced tens of billions of dollars of useless training within the existing Pell program. Those providers were at least accredited; these won’t need to be. The bill aims to stop abuses by insisting that programs get results, but that effort will once again require a level of quality and care in the use of data that is impossible in today’s Education Department. Together with the bill’s reversal of numerous accountability provisions aimed at for-profit schools, the legislation invites a new golden age of taxpayer fleecing.

DOGE has also made it very difficult to study the consequences of this legislation. A flawed risk-sharing scheme could undermine college access for poor students, as colleges admit only students they believe will pay back loans. Low loan limits could drive students into predatory private loans, particularly with the hobbling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The only way to assess the legislation’s effect would be to track outcomes and survey borrowers about their burdens. DOGE has crushed the capacity for this research. For example, it canceled the only representative survey of how students pay for college. Congress, voters, and students will all be flying blind.

If the conservatives who wrote these provisions are serious about their goals, their bill needs to include more funding for implementation. But even that would likely not be enough, as the Trump administration regularly refuses to spend the money they are given. A Congress serious about accountability would thus need to confront President Trump with a choice: No higher-education legislation — and hence no money to finance tax cuts — until the administration reverses enough of the devastation at the Education Department to implement the law. And should the Trump administration abandon that commitment in the future, the legislation should turn off automatically as well.

This seems fanciful, but facts are facts: If conservatives want accountability for higher education, they need to create accountability for the Trump administration as well.