The news on President Joe Biden’s attempt to cancel student loan debt has been coming in fast and furious this week. Here’s what you need to know about recent developments.
- Late last Friday the Department of Education posted an application for borrowers to apply for student loan cancellation. The application was specified to be a “Beta” version, but despite that provisional status the White House reported that eight million borrowers had completed the application by Monday morning. That’s an alarming share (almost 20%) of the 43 million borrowers who are believed to be eligible to have their loans forgiven.
- The slew of legal challenges to the executive order proposing to cancel student loans has faced a number of setbacks. The most notable was a decision coming in late yesterday afternoon from the federal judge overseeing the case brought by six Republican-led states against the administration, which was dismissed on the basis of legal standing. This was widely believed to be the strongest challenge and its dismissal creates a major setback to the effort to prevent the cancellation from occurring. An appeal has been filed along with a request for an injunction that would prevent loans from being canceled until the appeal can be considered. Many believe there is a good chance of the case being successful upon appeal.
- In the meantime, many on the Left are still celebrating the effort. Most notably with a bizarre new ad from Build Back Together, a group “dedicated to advancing the Biden-Harris administration’s policy agenda,” which introduces the slogan “$10K in your pocket” which is set to flashing graphics and techno music. The message might resonate with a target set of voters but also offers more fodder to those who were already skeptical of the seriousness of the effort.
Absent any further intervention from the courts, the Department of Education is expected to begin canceling student loans as early as Sunday, Oct. 23, though it is not clear whether the department is prepared, administratively, to take those steps.
The saga of Biden’s student loan cancellation will likely bring us further late-breaking news throughout the day and into the weekend. And as Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the nonpartisan Committee for Responsible Federal Budget, advised his followers on Twitter: “Please, please, please, do NOT assume you will have ‘$10k in your pocket’ after applying for student debt cancellation.” This is still far from a done deal.
This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.
