Conservatives are not happy with the compromise deal House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has struck with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a default on the national debt. Their objections largely center on the fact that the budget deal doesn’t do nearly enough to curtain the federal government's reckless spending, and that criticism is absolutely fair.

But there is at least one big win included in this budget deal: It will finally end the insane vacation from student loan payments that is still going on from the pandemic.

Way back in March 2020, the federal government “paused” student loan payments, figuring that the harsh economic impact of government lockdowns would mean many borrowers would struggle to make their payments. Yet this policy is still in place more than three years later, even though the economic prospects of college graduates have completely recovered, because Democrats have exploited it as a form of de facto student debt “cancellation” — in other words, a taxpayer-funded bailout.

You see, it’s not just that payments are temporarily paused but that the interest payments are being forgiven entirely, meaning many borrowers have had tens of thousands in student debt permanently passed on to taxpayers as a result of this “pause.”

Biden has extended it again and again even though he long ago admitted the pandemic was over and ended other COVID-19 policies. This deal will force the Biden administration to restart payments no later than 60 days after the bill is signed. This means that payments would resume as normal in August.

This might not sound like a big deal, but it absolutely is. The continued “pause” on student loan payments, while perhaps initially justified for a few months after COVID-19’s outbreak, is an absolutely disgraceful policy that by August will have cost taxpayers a whopping $194 billion. For context, that’s more than the U.S. government spent developing the COVID-19 vaccines!

Meanwhile, this policy has mostly benefited doctors, lawyers, and master's degree holders.

Data from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget show that keeping the pause in place through December 2022 effectively gave doctors $68,000 in debt relief, lawyers $41,500 in debt relief, and master's degree holders $18,500. It’s undoubtedly given even more in relief benefits since then — all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars every month.

Hence why the committee concluded that the “pause” is “costly, inflationary, regressive, and economically unjustified.”

Yes, you’ve got that right. The Biden administration has kept in place a deeply regressive pandemic-era policy that has transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from working-class taxpayers to doctors, lawyers, and other elites. And it’s absurdly done so in the name of “progressivism” and helping the struggling.

This atrocious policy should have been ended years ago. If McCarthy finally kills off Biden’s taxpayer-funded handouts to doctors and lawyers, his fiscally insufficient compromise deal will have at least one big silver lining.

Brad Polumbo ( @Brad_Polumbo ) is an independent journalist and the co-founder of BASEDPolitics .