Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona made another appearance on Capitol Hill this week, testifying before the House Education and the Workforce Committee in support of the president’s FY 2024 budget request, and to answer oversight questions.

Throughout the hearing, which was very partisan from the outset, Democrats highlighted areas of the education budget they support and derided the House budget plan to cut spending while Republicans focused their comments and questions on student loans and debt, cultural issues, and pandemic-related activities. For his part, Cardona tried to strike a moderating tone, telling the committee, “Now is not the time to break down in partisan or divisive culture wars, now is the time to choose to invest in our students, and raise the bar for education in this country.” 

The divisiveness of this and previous hearings this session, however, indicate the difficulty Congress will have coming to bipartisan agreements on education policy and education funding as the process continues. 

Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) set the tone for the majority in her opening statement by attacking the Department of Education on student loan forgiveness, culture war indoctrination, and pandemic school closures. She called student loan cancellation, “a regressive policy that benefits the top half of earners disproportionately and forces degreeless blue-collar workers to pay for PHDs.”  Speaking directly to Cardona, Foxx called the Department “one of the main proponents of this administration’s culture war on the American people” and that “by prolonging school closures at the behest of teachers’ unions, your Department made the single greatest education policy failure in our nation’s history. You let students lose 20 years of progress in core curricula like math, reading, and history.” 

Republicans continued this line of questioning throughout the hearing, highlighting their view of the illegality of the student loan forgiveness and Income Driven Repayment proposals, accusing the Department of promoting critical race theory, and allowing men to play on girls high school sports teams. 

In his opening statement, Ranking Member Bobby Scott (D-VA) praised Cardona for the administration’s budget proposal for “expanding access to high-quality education at every level,” and admonished the majority for voting for the Limit, Save, Grow Act, calling it a bill that makes “devastating cuts to programs for our students and educators,” and “makes college more expensive by eliminating Pell Grants for 80,000 students and reducing the maximum award for the remaining 6.6 million recipients. Finally, it eliminates badly needed student debt relief for more than 40 million eligible borrowers.”