Joe Biden revealed that his program to alleviate student debt will start in August of this year. Many feel it was an attempt to purchase votes for the upcoming midterm elections.
In August the White House posted in a statement that “The Department of Education will provide up to $20,000 in debt cancellation to Pell Grant recipients with loans held by the Department of Education, and up to $10,000 in debt cancellation to non-Pell Grant recipients.”
The statement added that the DoE would be “Cutting monthly payments in half for undergraduate loans. The Department of Education is proposing a new income-driven repayment plan that protects more low-income borrowers from making any payments and caps monthly payments for undergraduate loans at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income…”
A federal judge in Texas has now struck down Biden’s program, though. The administration’s effort to unfairly cancel student loans has been thwarted.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, who thankfully was appointed by Trump, declared Biden’s debt relief program to be “an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must be vacated.”
“The Education Department had already been prohibited from moving ahead with Biden’s student debt relief program under a temporary order from a federal appeals court in a separate case,” according to Politico.
But the latest decision extends much further in permanently prohibiting the Education Department from carrying out the entire program.
The Biden administration moved swiftly on Thursday evening to file an appeal. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that administration officials “strongly disagree” with the ruling and would continue to defend the debt relief program in court.
“The President and this Administration are determined to help working and middle-class Americans get back on their feet, while our opponents – backed by extreme Republican special interests – sued to block millions of Americans from getting much-needed relief,” Jean-Pierre declared in a statement.
The decision did not immediately reveal whether the agency would accept new debt relief applications, although the program’s website specifies that it will not accept new applications.
NEWS: Federal judge in Texas strikes down Biden's student debt relief program, declaring it illegal. pic.twitter.com/02Doi3CXwC
— Michael Stratford (@mstratford) November 10, 2022
More on this story via The Republic Brief:
“The Biden administration has approved 16 million applications for student debt relief, according to the department. Many of those decisions have been sent to the agency’s contracted loan servicers, which have been instructed to hold off on reducing borrowers’ loan accounts amid the legal fights,” Politico’s report continued. CONTINUE READING…