Remedial Education: Secretary Cardona Is Administration’s Latest Apparent Hatch Act Violator

Political rhetoric disguised as a student loan forgiveness update.

There seem to be a lot of slow learners in the Biden-Harris Administration. After both White House press secretaries, a deputy in the office, the Secretary of Energy and others were all found to have violated the Hatch Act – some multiple times – and after the White House and the Small Business Administration were accused of the same thing, one would expect officials to be circumspect about mixing politics with government business. One would be wrong.

Ironically, the remedial learner in this case is none other than Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) has asked the Office of Special Counsel and the Education Department inspector general to investigate what appears to be the secretary’s flagrant violation of the Hatch Act.

With less than four months to go before the 2024 election, and under the guise of updating student loan debtors on President Biden’s and Vice President Harris’s extremely political debt forgiveness giveaway, Secretary Cardona sent a mass email attacking Republicans and vowing to “fight” to get their loans forgiven.

Throughout the email, Secretary Cardona disparagingly referred to Republican elected officials as “siding with special interests and trying to block Americans from accessing all the benefits of the most affordable student loan repayment plan in history” and promoted President Biden and the Biden-Harris Administration as “fighting” for the recipients. The rhetoric and message are glaringly political:

Let me be clear: President Biden and I are determined to lower costs for student loan borrowers, to make repaying student affordable and realistic, and to build on our separate efforts that have already provided relief to 4.75 million Americans – no matter how many times Republican elected officials try to stop us.

The partisan nature of the email is even more starkly evident when one considers that, despite the letter’s focus on Republican elected officials, opposition to the administration’s student loan forgiveness plans comes from lawmakers of both parties. Such hacktastic misuse of government resources in the service of a political campaign is why the Hatch Act exists. Secretary Cardona appears to be abusing his government office to make a naked political appeal to “4.75 million Americans.” In this, he’s joining Karine Jean-Pierre as a high-level Biden administration official who seems to think he’s above the laws that lesser employees must abide by.

“You almost have to admire the chutzpa of sending out full-on campaign literature to millions of citizens from your official Education Department email address,” said PPT director Michael Chamberlain. “Unfortunately, it’s indicative of the attitude of too many in this administration toward the restrictions and ethics standards by which the executive branch is supposed to operate – the ones President Biden and Vice President Harris referred to when they promised the most ethical administration in history.”

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