A top Republican lawmaker accuses the Education Department of 'blatantly lying' about how much its student-loan forgiveness costs

• An independent auditor found "weakness" in how the Education Department calculated student-debt relief costs.
• GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx accused the department of "blatantly lying" in its estimates.

An independent auditor took issue with how President Joe Biden's Education Department calculated costs of its student-loan forgiveness proposal.

On Monday, KPMG — a public accounting firm — released the results of its audit of the department's financial statements from fiscal year 2022. But for the first time in 20 years, as Politico reported, KPMG was unable to "obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence" to produce an opinion, citing "material weakness" in the department's financial reporting on its student-debt relief plans — and was therefore unable to determine whether any adjustments to the department's balance sheet may have been necessary.

While the auditor did not say that the department explicitly lied about costs of its proposals, Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House education committee, accused it of doing just that.

"The Department is blatantly lying about how much taxpayer money it is giving away," Foxx said in a statement. "Two years and a half a trillion dollars later, it appears nothing has changed. This auditor said it wouldn't touch the Department's shoddy guesses with a ten-foot pole let alone sign off on them. This is absolutely ridiculous."

In September, the department estimated that its broad student-debt relief plan would cost $30 billion annually over the next decade, and that 81% of borrowers would participate in the relief. But KPMG said that those estimates were "not properly designed at an appropriate level of precision" to determine the take-up rate, or how many borrowers would actually take the necessary steps to get the relief.

A department spokesperson told Politico that "the initial assumptions in the estimate were based on information available at the time that was applied to a new program that had not yet launched."

"The ongoing court challenges to the program have blocked individuals from applying to the program, and therefore the Department has not been able to use concrete application data to demonstrate the accuracy of its estimate take-up rate," the spokesperson continued.

As the spokesperson noted, Biden's plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for federal borrowers is currently paused due to two conservative-backed lawsuits that blocked the relief late last year. Prior to the court challenges, over 20 million borrowers had applied for the relief, but the department is unable to progress with implementation until the Supreme Court rules on whether the plan can move forward.

Both cases will be heard by the nation's highest court on February 28, and student-loan payments remain on pause until 60 days after June 30, or 60 days after the litigation is resolved — whichever happens first.