Biden administration believes student loan forgiveness plan will survive

Biden’s 2020 campaign promise to erase student debt was thwarted at the Supreme Court in June.

The conservative-majority court ruled that Biden did not have the authority to forgive $400 billion in student debt without prior authorization from Congress. Biden had attempted to cancel the debt of nearly all of the 40 million federal student loan borrowers, with many people getting up to $20,000 in forgiveness.

This time, the Biden administration has scaled back aid by targeting specific groups of borrowers, including those who have been repaying for decades or who attend schools of low financial value. He hopes that will help the plan survive in a court that is skeptical of broad loan forgiveness, experts say.

More than 25 million borrowers could still benefit from the program.

As a result, for critics of widespread student loan forgiveness, Biden’s new plan looks a lot like the first.

After the president touted his revised relief package on April 8, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, written the that Biden is “shamelessly trying to eclipse the Constitution.”

“See you in court,” Bailey wrote.

Besides being a more targeted aid program, the U.S. Department of Education also uses another law – the Higher Education Act – as a legal justification. Biden’s first pardon plan was based on the Higher Education Student Relief Opportunities Act of 2003, or HEROES Act.

The HEROES Act was passed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and grants the president broad authority to revise student loan programs during a national emergency. The Biden administration first attempted to use this law because, at the time, the country was in a state of national emergency over the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, conservative justices did not accept this argument.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion for Biden v. Nebraska: “But imagine asking Congress a more pertinent question instead: “Can the Secretary use his powers to cancel $430 billion in student loans, completely canceling the loan balances of 20 million borrowers, while a pandemic coming to an end? “?'”

“We can’t believe the answer is yes.”

The HEA, which the Biden administration is now using, was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 and gives the Secretary of Education some authority to forgive or discharge borrowers’ student loan debt.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., ran for president in 2020, she cited the HEA as a law that would allow her to provide sweeping loan relief.

“This authority provides a safety valve to federal student loan programs, letting the Department of Education use its discretion to forgive loans even when they do not meet eligibility criteria for more specific forgiveness programs ” Warren wrote in her student loan forgiveness proposal. SO.