When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel nearly half a trillion dollars of student debt, his administration moved quickly to show that it wasn’t giving up.
“I will stop at nothing to find other ways to deliver relief to hard-working middle-class families,” the president said in a statement. “This fight is not over.”
Within hours, Biden announced a new plan for loan forgiveness. Unlike his first attempt, which used the HEROES Act of 2003 to tie debt cancellation to the pandemic national emergency, the new program is based on the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA), which gives the Secretary of Education the right to “compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand” pertaining to student debt, without requiring a specific cause.
The authority has previously been used to forgive the loan debts of specific groups, such as borrowers who are disabled, work as teachers, or who could not finish a program because their school closed. It had never been applied to a class as broad as those would have been forgiven under the first plan, which attempted to cancel $10,000 of debt for those who earn under $125,000 and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
Dr. Rebecca Natow, assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at Hofstra University
Still, supporters of debt relief argue that the HEA is a perfectly legitimate source of authority.
“The text says, ‘any claim.’ It seems really broad,” said John P. Hunt, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law. “This is just giving the Department of Education the same power that any private creditor would have to say, ‘You don’t owe me the money anymore because I don’t want to collect it, for whatever reason.’”
Some have argued that the HEA was better justification for the forgiveness program to begin with. Indeed, the Biden administration appears to have considered it in 2021. So, why didn’t the president pull the trigger? Hunt believes that Biden wanted to signal that the debt cancellation was meant to be one-time-only by tying it to the pandemic.
