US President Joe Biden is seen before speaking before the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, September 12, 2024.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP Getty Images
A federal judge has extended a temporary restraining order against the Biden administration’s latest student loan forgiveness plan, threatening hopes that the White House will provide financial aid to tens of millions of Americans before the November 5 presidential election.
U.S. District Judge Randal Hall, appointed by former Republican President George W. Bush, said Wednesday that he will uphold an order blocking the Biden administration from forgiving student loans for an additional 14 days.
In the meantime, Hall said he would review the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction against the Biden aid plan, and the Biden administration’s request to dismiss the case.
The passage of the ban is the latest setback for the Biden administration’s efforts to cancel federal student loans. President Joe Biden has since promised to ease people’s education debt during the 2020 campaign, but Republican legal challenges have continually stymied those efforts.
The development stems from a lawsuit against the president’s aid package brought by seven GOP-led states earlier this month. Those states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Dakota and Ohio — say the U.S. Department of Education’s new debt cancellation efforts, like previous efforts, are illegal.
The states also accused the Biden administration of trying to implement the plan in secret before a final rule on the program was issued in October, which would have violated rules on the new regulatory timeline.
However, a Biden administration official told CNBC on September 11 that the Department of Education does not plan to forgive up to $147 billion in student loans for 25 million Americans until it is approved.
Hall first issued a temporary restraining order against Biden’s debt plan on September 5, shortly after the state sued.
Biden’s plan would forgive student loans for four groups of borrowers: those who owe more than they originally owed, those who have been paying off their loans for decades, students from schools with low financial value and those who qualify for loan forgiveness. existing but not yet implemented programs.
About 3 in 4 federal student loan holders are expected to benefit from the policy, if it is included with the previous Biden administration’s debt relief efforts, according to estimates by the Center for American Progress. Over the summer, the Biden administration emailed millions of student loan borrowers, signaling that debt forgiveness was on the way.
During the presidential debate on September 10, former President Donald Trump matched the Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris’ promise to protect abortion rights in the US to the Democratic pledge to cancel student loans.
“That’s just talk,” Trump said. “You know what that reminds me of? When they said they were going to get student loans to stop and it ended up being a total disaster.”
“They didn’t come close to getting student loans,” she added later. “They are mocking young people and many other people who have loans. They will never get approved.”
But it was Republican officials who tried to block the relief, and Republican judges who ruled against the aid package, said Luke Herrine, an assistant professor of law at the University of Alabama.
When the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s first attempt to forgive student loans in June 2023, the vote was split along ideological lines, with liberal justices voting to uphold the program.