The Supreme Court could kill student debt relief again — right after the election
Joseph Zeballos-Roig
July 7, 2023
The Biden administration is giving student debt forgiveness another shot. But don’t expect this sequel to work out much better than the original, experts are warning.
“Everything seems set up to fail, but in an elongated way,” Braxton Brewington, press secretary of the Debt Collective, a pro-student loan cancellation group, told Semafor.
After the Supreme Court nixed his first attempt last week, President Biden quickly announced that he’d once again try to cancel student debt for millions of Americans under a different legal authority.
This time, the administration is invoking a section of the 1965 Higher Education Act, which allows the secretary of education to “compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances.”
But that parallel track may do little to steel another debt relief program against legal challenges, higher education analysts told Semafor. The key reason: Conservative justices are already signaling that Congress hasn’t delegated specific authority to the executive branch for mass debt cancellation.
