The GOP War on Nurses

As they took control of both chambers of Congress and the White House in 2025, Republicans faced a dilemma. They wanted to extend the tax cuts enacted during Donald Trump’s first term, a central priority of both the president and the party’s corporate and donor base. But because the tax extensions would blow a multi-trillion-dollar hole in the ten-year deficit projection, they risked losing the votes of fiscal hawks inside their caucus.

So, Republicans went hunting for “pay-fors” to lessen the deficit damage. They axed tax credits for EVs and clean energy and decimated funding for Medicaid and SNAP. But in addition to these well-publicized cuts, they radically reduced federal student loan subsidies, including those for graduate students.

Of course, they didn’t say out loud that they were reducing support for graduate education to finance tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. Instead, they and conservative think tanks argued for the cuts on other grounds. First, invoking the so-called Bennett Hypothesis—named after the former Education Secretary, William J. Bennett, who articulated the theory—they claimed that federal student aid enables colleges to raise tuition, and that cutting federal funding will therefore force tuition prices down. Second, channeling arguments made by pronatalists at places like the Heritage Foundation, they said that young people, especially women, spend too long in graduate school, delaying marriage and childbearing, and that shrinking higher-education subsidies will boost the fertility rate.

These arguments point in opposite directions. The first claims that cutting federal loan support will make graduate education cheaper and therefore easier to earn, the other that those cuts will make grad school harder to pursue. Regardless, both converge on the same policy outcome: less federal money for graduate education, more for tax cuts.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/12/22/gop-war-on-nurses-graduate-student-loans-tax-cuts/