A few weeks after the Supreme Court disabused President Joe Biden of the notion that he could unilaterally cancel $430 billion in student loans, Biden has now announced that his administration will instead cancel $39 billion in student debt held by 800,000 borrowers.
Still, this is an unusually convenient time for the administration to discover such a failure, inasmuch as it enables Biden to attempt to accomplish part of the broad-ranging debt cancellation that the Supreme Court just kept him from implementing.
To Congress' limited criteria, Biden has added periods of forbearance, including the three years when borrowers saw no payment obligations or income accrual due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Further, while Congress specified that only payments made under certain plans would count, Biden thinks it's best if all payments are now counted, regardless of whether the borrower had a qualifying plan at the time.
The why is obvious: Biden wants to make more borrowers eligible for cancellation and to make their debt disappear faster, if not immediately.
In Biden v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court criticized Biden and Cardona for "Red penciling" the Higher Education Act-deleting and then adding provisions to the law to create a novel student loan forgiveness program better tailored to the administration's goals than Congress' original handiwork.
It is unclear whether this prong of Biden's revised approach to student loans will face legal challenge.
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