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The average CMC graduate owes the federal government $13,962 in student loans. Though Washington provides only a portion of the financial assistance available to CMC students, the graduating class of 2023 owed the federal government nearly $2.5 million.
As a result, many students and young professionals who borrowed to fund their costly undergraduate education were elated to see President Joe Biden stick to his guns and fulfill his campaign promise to cancel up to $10,000 dollars of student debt per borrower. He even promised Pell Grant recipients up to $20,000. In rare form, his White House produced results as promised – or so they claimed. Unfortunately for CMC students and the millions of others across the United States receiving aid, a federal court struck down the most recent version of Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan last Thursday, marking the second time such a program has been upended by the judiciary. With millions of college students enrolled in Biden’s various debt programs and counting on loan forgiveness, he and Vice President Harris must discontinue the legislative trickery they have employed in their attempts to forge grounds to fulfill this lofty campaign promise.
The first iteration of the plan, which promised to “cancel $10,000 of student debt for low- to middle-income borrowers,” was announced in a lengthy White House Fact Sheet released in August 2022. The legal foundation for this plan was the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 (HEROES Act), a piece of Bush-era legislation that Biden shakily attempted to fundamentally alter to accommodate his cancellation of student loans. HEROES was intended to provide “waivers or modifications” of the student loans provided to the “hundreds of thousands of Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, and Coast Guard” troops that were called to service after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The legislation was intended to provide a narrowly defined group of individuals with a temporary relief from their student loan payments while they heroically served their country. Specifically, the law “provides waivers or modifications” to student loan payments “in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”
Despite providing a plethora of socioeconomic data going back nearly forty years, the Fact Sheet entirely fails to mention the HEROES Act and just twice discusses the COVID-19 pandemic, the national emergency supposedly requiring its invocation. The vast majority of student borrowers were likely totally unaware of the HEROES Act’s existence or its connection to Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, but in this omission, the administration irresponsibly misled the public about the nature of the proposal. Neglecting the spirit of transparency and integrity, cornerstones of our democratic system, Biden intentionally concealed the fact that this student debt cancellation plan is haphazardly tied to decades-old legislation intended for an entirely different purpose.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the HEROES Act was only used in conjunction with wartime student loan waivers. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, the Trump administration used HEROES to continue the student loan waivers temporarily provided by his CARES Act earlier that year. While Trump’s use of HEROES expanded the scope of those receiving leniency on their payments, no one was given loan cancellation; instead, following in the spirit of the original law, loan repayment was temporarily waived until the emergency ended.
Unlike the Biden administration, Trump’s team released a detailed memo explaining how the program worked and the legislation to which it was tied. Though the Trump White House was not known for its remarkable clarity or unshakeable integrity, their release provides an unmistakable distinction from Biden’s Fact Sheet, which totally excludes the proposal’s legislative background. By the time Biden announced his plan, 40 states had already ended their COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Declarations, undermining the assertion that the plan was truly a result of an emergency situation. Whether one agrees with the goals of the program or not, it is clear that the Biden White House saw few legitimate means for implementing it and made the conscious decision to abusively expand an existing program.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s plan as it existed in a 6-3 ruling last summer. The court’s ruling hinged largely upon the Department of Education’s aggressive and expansive view of the HEROES Act’s provision for “waivers or modifications” of student loan programs. Chief Justice Roberts went so far as to claim that the “plan has ‘modified’ the cited provisions only in the same sense that the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility — it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely.”
The Democrats have promised to continue fighting for student loan debt forgiveness, but their options are limited. Lacking support for legislation of this nature in Congress, Biden’s second attempt to finagle legal grounds for student loan forgiveness repeated his overreaching and abusive strategies by similarly corrupting the Higher Education Act of 1965. This latest attempt to provide loan forgiveness via the SAVE Plan was barred by a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Eleventh Circuit last Thursday and will likely meet its end at the Supreme Court. The Eleventh Circuit granted a temporary restraining order that will allow the seven red states challenging the validity of the SAVE Plan to present their case before the Court of Appeals before the plan goes into effect. In their challenge, the Attorneys General for these states will seek to prove that the Secretary of Education has no legal standing under the Higher Education Act of 1965 to forgive student loan debt.
As Biden looks to pass his shoddy student loan strategies off to Vice President Harris with the 2024 election looming, I will offer him a word of advice by borrowing his phrasing: Don’t.
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