The American Principles Project (APP) is calling on congressional education committees to investigate former President Joe Biden’s use of taxpayer dollars to fund warfare against Christian schools.
In a letter sent Tuesday to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, APP alleges that the Department of Education (ED) under the Biden administration issued attacks on 12 Christian colleges and universities, targeting them at an unfair rate compared to secular institutions.
“During the Biden Administration, federal officials shamelessly used taxpayer dollars to attack Christians, their values and their institutions,” the letter reads. “Nearly 70 percent of the Department’s enforcement actions have involved faith-based and career schools, despite those schools representing less than 10 percent of students nationwide. The Biden Administration used excessive fines, scrutinize-and-harassment tactics and withholding of federal funding to punish Christian schools for their beliefs and push them to close their doors.”
The letter, first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, states that “12 Christian colleges and universities were targeted with excessive penalties or banned from receiving federal student aid” compared to none of the Ivy League schools.
APP also claimed that the fines issued against faith-based schools was significantly higher than those issued to non-religious schools.
Fines issued against Grand Canyon University (GCU) under Biden, for instance, amounted to $37.7 million, and Liberty University was forced to pay $14 million, the letter stated. Combined, the “fines total more than all other penalties assessed by the Department of Education over the past seven years.”
The massive fine against GCU, the largest Christian university in the country, was issued due to allegations the school “deceived students by holding itself out as a non-profit institution and misrepresenting the costs and number of courses required to earn doctoral degrees,” according to a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission.
“I am calling on you to hold an investigatory hearing into the Biden Administration’s discriminatory practices against Christian institutions,” the letter reads. “Those who actively pursued this anti-Christian agenda must be held accountable; we need to ensure that these excessive retaliatory fines are dropped entirely and not simply transferred to another department for payout. The reaction from lawmakers must be made perfectly clear so that we can ensure our schools are protected from attacks on religious freedom in the future.”
The administration also “weaponized” the Clery Act, which requires schools to release annual security reports, and Integrated Postsecondary Education Systems (IPEDS), a system of surveys conducted by ED to collect data on colleges and universities receiving federal student aid, against Christian schools, fining religious institutions an average of $815,000 for alleged violations compared to $228,571 for nonreligious schools, APP claimed.
Biden has frequently come under fire by Christians for targeting their faith despite claiming to be a devout Catholic.
The FBI reportedly “abused its counterterrorism tools” to target Catholics and pro-life advocates, labeling them as “potential domestic terrorists,” according to the House Weaponization Subcommittee. The committee was referring to a February 2023 memo from the Richmond field office that described traditionalist Roman Catholics as “radical,” which the Bureau eventually retracted.
The Biden administration was also accused of infringing on religious freedom after it attempted to force religious doctors and hospitals to perform transgender surgeries despite the procedures conflicting with their faith. Biden later took flak for issuing a proclamation for a “transgender day of visibility” on Easter Sunday.
ED did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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