In a decision released on Friday, the Supreme Court struck down Joe Biden’s student loan “forgiveness” plan.
Biden’s plan, which was unveiled last August, mere months before the midterm elections, sought to cancel $10,000 of debt for individual student loan borrowers earning less than $125,000 per year (or $250,000 for households) and $20,000 of debt for borrowers who received a Pell Grant.
The court heard two cases on this issue back in February, Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown. In Biden v. Nebraska, the court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines against Biden’s plan, while it unanimously denied standing in the Department of Education v. Brown case.
Biden’s Education Department utilized the HEROES Act of 2003, which grants the U.S. secretary of Education the authority to let military service members postpone their student loan payments during national crises, previously used to postpone student loan payments during the COVID pandemic. But the Biden administration attempted to use the HEROES Act to forgive debt.
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“The text of the HEROES Act does not authorize the Secretary’s loan forgiveness program,” the court’s ruling stated. “The Secretary’s power under the Act to ‘modify’ does not permit ‘basic and fundamental changes in the scheme’ designed by Congress.”
The authority to “modify” statutes and regulations allows the Secre- tary to make modest adjustments and additions to existing provisions, not transform them. Prior to the COVID–19 pandemic, “modifications” issued under the Act were minor and had limited effect. But the “modifications” challenged here create a novel and fundamentally different loan forgiveness program. While Congress specified in the Education Act a few narrowly delineated situations that could qualify a borrower for loan discharge, the Secretary has extended such discharge to nearly every borrower in the country. It is “highly unlikely that Congress” authorized such a sweeping loan cancellation program “through such a subtle device as permission to ‘modify.’ ”
In her dissent, Justice Elana Kagan bizarrely argued that “In every respect, the Court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our Nation’s governance.”
Biden’s plan was widely acknowledged by experts to be unconstitutional. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed Biden lacked the authority to forgive student debt. “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness,” she said last July. “He does not. He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power. That… has to be an act of Congress.”
Pelosi only changed her mind after Biden decided to go ahead with the plan, which was widely believed to be an effort to boost turnout of young Americans in the midterm elections that would inevitably be struck down by the Supreme Court.
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