Andrew Gillen’s Federal Budget Reform Opportunities in Higher Education for 2026, written for the Cato Institute, presents a sober, thoughtful series of suggestions for fiscal reform in federal higher education policy. Translation: Gillen calls for significant pruning of higher education spending, but not for zeroing it out. He calls for “policies that would save more than $265 billion over the next 10 years.” His proposals, framed almost exclusively in the language of dollars and cents, provide a reasonable framework for building on the reforms of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025. He is largely persuasive in his detailed suggestions, which are:

Key reforms and their potential savings for taxpayers over the next 10 years include:

• eliminating subsidized loans (up to $14 billion);
• eliminating or capping Public Service Loan Forgiveness (up to $30 billion);
• modifying the Repayment Assistance Plan;
• phasing out campus-based aid (up to $21 billion);
• repealing ineffective tax expenditures (over $200 billion); and
• benchmarking research overhead rates.

The current U.S. Department of Education (ED) budget is in the neighborhood of $80 billion a year in direct spending, while acting as the middleman for another $100+ billion in student aid a year. That amounts to about $180 billion a year, or $1.8 trillion in ten years. Gillen calls for reducing spending by $265 billion in 10 years, but that includes more than $200 billion of annual reductions from repealing higher education tax credits and deductions rather than from cutting direct government spending. Gillen’s reform program, by back-of-the-envelope calculations, would reduce direct government spending for the Education Department as a whole (including student aid) by about 3.6 percent. This is a significant pruning, but not revolutionary. Given that most Congressmen probably don’t have an appetite for revolutionary cuts in higher education spending, this seems a sensible approach.

Gillen would save the most money by repealing higher education tax credits and deductions—about 75 percent of his proposed savings. This number by itself is a valuable reminder that federal support for higher education proceeds largely through indirect measures. Federal student aid is larger than the rest of the ED budget combined, and tax credits—visible only through detective work such as Gillen’s—add further to the total scale of federal fiscal intervention in higher education. Direct federal spending on higher education is a relatively small part of the whole, and fiscal education reformers must—as Gillen—be sure to address the submerged portion of the iceberg.

Gillen’s paper focuses almost exclusively on fiscal matters. There are moments when larger ideals surface, as when he proposes eliminating or capping public service loan forgiveness:

PSLF is poorly designed and it is unfair. The program’s design is misguided and badly targeted. The premise of PSLF is that those who work for public or nonprofit organizations are either more valuable to society than those who don’t, or are undercompensated relative to those who don’t. There is little reason to believe that is the case.

Even this much is laconic—one might put it more strongly, that most public “service” is counterproductive grift, weaponized by radical lunatics to impose their pet fallacies on the American people. Nor does Gillen address the crucial point that higher education is not only inefficient but also has become a machine for creating more radical lunatics. Its inefficiency is its saving grace. And the reason to care about higher education reform, the goal of what we aim at, is to restore American higher education to its proper purposes—the search for truth, the preservation of Western civilization, and virtuous citizenship to preserve our republic.

But that argument need not be made everywhere. Indeed, since some members of the public are uncomfortable with such idealism, the cause of higher education reform is served well by having some wings of the movement articulate their critique in the sober language of dollars and cents. We should not forget our ultimate goals—but we should welcome contributions such as Gillen’s, which ably forward fiscal reform in federal higher education policy.

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