The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ruled that President Joe Biden did not have the constitutional or statutory authority to ‘forgive’ billions of dollars in student loans, and in doing so, quoted former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In a 6-3 decision, the Court determined that the Department of Education lacked the authority to forgive a portion of the student loan debt, specifically up to $20,000, for certain borrowers. President Joe Biden had invoked a provision from the 2003 HEROES Act to justify the implementation of this initiative.
Then-Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) initially expressed skepticism about Biden’s ability to forgive the loans unilaterally, but she later expressed support and approval for the action.
“People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress,” Pelosi said in a 2021 press conference. “The President can’t do it. So that’s not even a discussion. Not everybody realizes that. But the President can only postpone, delay, but not forgive.”
“In light of the sweeping and unprecedented impact of the Secretary’s loan forgiveness program, it would seem more accurate to describe the program as being in the ‘wheelhouse’ of the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations,” Roberts wrote in agreement.
The student loan payment moratorium was initiated by then-President Donald Trump at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and President Joe Biden subsequently extended it on multiple occasions. However, the moratorium is scheduled to come to an end in August as a result of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which extended the debt ceiling until 2025.
Per SCOTUS Blog:
By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its authority last year when it announced that it would cancel up to $400 billion in student loans. The Biden administration had said that as many as 43 million Americans would have benefitted from the loan forgiveness program; almost half of those borrowers would have had all of their student loans forgiven.
When the Biden administration announced the program in August 2022, student-loan repayments had already been on hold for over two years. Betsy DeVos, who served as the secretary of education during the Trump administration, suspended both repayments and the accrual of interest on federal student loans at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. She relied on the HEROES Act, a law passed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks that gives the secretary of education the power to respond to a national emergency by “waiv[ing] or modify[ing] any statutory or regulatory provision” governing the student-loan programs so that borrowers are not worse off financially because of the emergency.
Biden’s decision to permanently cancel up to $20,000 in loans for borrowers who qualify would have fulfilled a pledge that he made during his 2020 run for president. But after federal courts in Missouri and Texas put the program on hold last year, the Biden administration came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to weigh in.
