U.S. President Joe Biden looks on before speaking to mark the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act on the South Lawn of the White House on September 12, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Caballero Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images
The federal judge is the Biden administration’s latest Student Loan Forgiveness The plan threatens White House hopes of providing financial relief to tens of millions of Americans ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election. Presidential Election.
U.S. District Judge Randall Hall Appointed He said Wednesday he would uphold an order from former Republican President George W. Bush that bars the Biden administration from extending student loan debt forgiveness for 14 days.
Meanwhile, Hall said he would consider the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction against Biden’s relief plan, as well as the Biden administration’s request to dismiss the lawsuit.
The continued injunction marks the latest setback for the Biden administration’s efforts to forgive Americans’ federal student loan debt. President Joe Biden began promising to ease Americans’ education loan burdens during the 2020 campaign, but his efforts have been consistently thwarted by Republican legal challenges.
The move comes after seven Republican-led states filed a lawsuit earlier this month challenging the president’s aid package. The states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Dakota and Ohio – argue that the U.S. Department of Education’s new debt forgiveness efforts, like previous attempts, are unlawful.
States have also accused the Biden administration of trying to implement the plan in secret before the program’s final rules are published in October, which would violate rules on the timeline of new regulations.
But a Biden administration official told CNBC on Sept. 11 that the Education Department did not plan to begin forgiving up to $147 billion in student loan debt for up to 25 million Americans until it was authorized to do so.
Governor Hall first issued a temporary injunction against Biden’s debt plan on September 5, shortly after the states filed their lawsuit.
Biden’s plan would forgive student loans for four groups of borrowers: those who owe more than they originally borrowed, those who have already been paying back for decades, students at low-value schools and those who qualify for loan forgiveness under existing programs but haven’t applied.
Three out of four people Federal Student Loan Holders Millions of people are expected to benefit from the policy, combined with the Biden administration’s previous debt relief measures, according to estimates from the Center for American Progress. The Biden administration sent emails to millions of student loan borrowers this summer warning them that debt forgiveness was on the way.
During the Sept. 10 presidential debate, former President Donald Trump likened Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris’ promise to protect abortion rights in the United States to the Democrats’ pledge to forgive student loan debt.
“That’s just lip service,” Trump said. “What does it remind you of? When I said I was going to cancel student loan payments and it ended up being a disaster.”
“They couldn’t even come close to getting student loans,” he later added. “They made a mockery of young people and a lot of people with loans. There’s no way they’d ever approve this.”
But it was Republican government officials who tried to block the relief, and Republican judges who ruled against the aid, said Luke Herrin, an assistant law professor at the University of Alabama.
When the Supreme Court rejected President Biden’s first attempt at large-scale student loan forgiveness in June 2023, the vote was split 6-3 along ideological lines, with the more liberal justices voting to uphold the program.
