Biden tries again on major student debt forgiveness plan

Times Higher Education

Paul Basken

July 19, 2023

Just two weeks after the Supreme Court invalidated Joe Biden’s $400 billion (£310 billion) student debt forgiveness plan, the US president has opened a new process to try it again.

“We will keep working to ensure that borrowers get the help they are entitled to,” Mr Biden’s undersecretary of education, James Kvaal, told a day-long hearing to begin writing new regulations to formally cancel large swathes of student debt.

In the plan rejected late last month by the Supreme Court, the Biden administration tried to take advantage of the Covid pandemic to wipe away student debt under the terms of a law that allows such actions during a national emergency.

The new effort relies on a separate part of federal higher education law that gives the president a more general authority to waive education-related debts owed to the government.

That is not necessarily a guarantee against a similar rejection by the Supreme Court, as the court’s conservative supermajority – in waging an ideological battle against the size of government – has put forth a broad assertion that presidents cannot take what the court considers to be major financial actions without the explicit approval of Congress.

And politically, Republicans have made clear their intent to keep up the fight. “Biden’s push for massive student loan debt cancellation is an alarming overreach,” Michael Burgess, a Republican representative from Texas, said in a Twitter post. “Ignoring the recent Supreme Court decision and our constitutional framework sets a dangerous precedent.”

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