President Joe Biden 's plans to cancel student loan debt have been partially blocked thanks to a pair of court rulings, but the matter remains alive for both sides in the 2024 election .
Responding to lawsuits filed by a pair of Republican attorneys general, federal judges in Missouri and Kansas ruled this week that Biden's Saving on a Valuable Education program cannot be fully implemented, temporarily pausing major elements until the case is decided.
That means millions of people with student loans who were set to have them reduced or even completely written off may no longer receive that benefit. The rulings are not final, but the freeze is the latest setback for Biden after the Supreme Court decided a prior iteration of student loan cancellation exceeded his authority last year.
The White House responded to the court decisions by blaming Republicans and "special interests" opposed to Biden's agenda. But the statement by press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also underscores the ways in which the president is determined to make student debt a campaign issue as he runs for a second term.
He has struggled with support from young voters, in part due to his handling of the war in Gaza, but student loans are one domestic matter that could appeal to the largely Democratic group.
"We will continue to provide this long-overdue relief, no matter how many times Republican elected officials and their allies try to stop us,” Jean-Pierre said.
The two judges, both Obama appointees, did not fully block the SAVE plan. Debt for 414,000 borrowers in the amount of $5.5 billion has already been forgiven, and the rulings will not attempt to claw those amounts back. But far larger amounts that would be written off over the next 10 years have been put on hold for now.
A second phase of the program would have taken effect Monday, recalculating future payments at less than half of what they are now, but that will not happen due to the rulings.
Most loans that qualify for the SAVE Plan are never fully repaid, leaving the balance to fall on taxpayers. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated that Biden’s SAVE program could cost taxpayers $475 billion, an amount that will be far lower if the rulings stand.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey celebrated the news, posting on X, “Congress never gave Biden the authority to saddle working Americans with half-a-trillion dollars in other people’s debt. A huge win for the Constitution.”
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach called Biden's plan "unfair," adding that "blue collar Kansas workers who didn’t go to college shouldn’t have to pay off the student loans of New Yorkers with gender studies degrees."
But the Biden campaign pointed the finger at someone else — former President Donald Trump .
“Joe Biden understands it’s his job to make Americans' lives better, and that's exactly why he’s fighting like hell to ease the burden of student debt," Biden campaign spokesman Seth Schuster said. "Donald Trump doesn't care about making Americans' lives better — he's only running for himself, and he's doing everything he can to bury the middle class under piles of debt, promising to roll back policies that give the middle class deserved relief.”
Trump has been somewhat less vocal about student loans, and his campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner. However, he did address it during a recent rally in Racine, Wisconsin, implying that Biden's student debt programs are a campaign stunt.
“[Biden] did that with the tuition, and that didn’t work out too well," Trump said. "He got rebuked , and then he did it again — it’s going to get rebuked again. Even more so, it’s an even more vile attack, but he did that with tuition just to get publicity with the election."
Despite Trump's confidence that the SAVE program would get struck down in court, CATO Institute scholar Neal McCluskey said he was not so sure.
“This wasn’t necessarily expected, and people weren’t sure which way these courts would go,” McCluskey said. “These were also a little lower-profile because basically, the administration has tried about 1,000 different ways to cancel loans.”
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Support for student loan forgiveness tends to fall along ideological lines, which is why Democrats are likely to keep pushing cancellation and Republicans will keep opposing it.
A recent Associated Press-NORC poll found that 4 in 10 adults think it is extremely or very important for the federal government to provide student debt relief, but while just 15% of Republicans agree, 58% of Democrats support the idea.
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