An Ohio group has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold previous decisions that invalidated the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program.
In July, amicus or “friend of the court” Briefly, the conservative think tank Buckeye Institute has criticized the latest student loan forgiveness plan as unconstitutional and overstepping congressional boundaries. The group supports overturning an appeals court decision that allowed the Biden administration’s Savings for Value Education (SAVE) program to continue its challenge to it goes through the courts.
“Despite Congress’s clear restrictions on when and how student loan borrowers can obtain forgiveness or cancellation of their direct loans, the Department (of Education) created a new student loan forgiveness program without congressional approval,” the institute wrote in its letter, which was joined by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation and the Kansas Justice Institute.
The Buckeye Institute says student loan borrowers “are contractually obligated to repay their loans” and know the impact an unpaid loan can have on credit scores, among other risks. Officers trying to “forgive” the loans through the “Revised Pay-As-You-Earn (REPAYE) Plan” also know that these loans must be repaid, one way or another, the group said in its letter.
“While some may praise the president and the secretary (of education) for generously distributing Treasury assets, the REPAYE plan does not legally release borrowers from their obligation to repay and does not release the government from its obligation to collect delinquent loans,” the institute and partner groups wrote.
This isn’t the first time the Ohio group has weighed in on the student loan forgiveness debate. The Institute filed his own lawsuit against the previous student loan forgiveness program in 2022 and has filed legal opinions on the issue in appellate and higher court cases, such as Biden v. Nebraska.
In Biden v. Nebraska, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the states in the lawsuit had standing to challenge the president’s earlier attempt to forgive student loans and that the case should be returned to a lower court.
This plan relied on the 2003 regulations. Act on the possibilities of assistance for students in higher education (HEROES) as the source of authority to cancel the debts of 20 million student loan borrowers — amounting to $430 billion in forgiven balances — and reduce the debt amounts for another 23 million Americans. The plan allows the U.S. Secretary of Education to modify or waive student financial aid requirements for individuals who are on busy duty in the military, serving in the National Guard, living in a declared disaster area, or suffering “immediate economic hardship as a direct result of war or other military operation or national emergency,” according to the law.
The law also allows the Secretary of Education to grant waivers to ensure that “affected individuals who received student financial aid… are not placed at a financial disadvantage with respect to that financial aid because of their status,” among other waiver authorizations.
The nation’s highest court agreed with those suing the Biden administration over the plan, finding that the HEROES Act “does not authorize a loan cancellation plan.”
“Today we hold that the statute permits the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial aid programs under the Education Act, rather than to rewrite that act from scratch,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in majority opinion.
