Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Another Pillar of Biden’s Student Debt Plan

A federal judge placed a temporary hold on another component of President Biden’s student debt relief plan on Thursday, siding with a coalition of seven Republican states that filed a lawsuit to halt the program on Tuesday.

The ruling comes as yet another blow to the president’s student debt relief agenda after the Supreme Court upheld a similar hold on the SAVE program, the centerpiece of his strategy to cancel tens of millions of dollars in student debt.

The plan at issue in Thursday’s ruling is meant to cancel debt for as many as 27 million borrowers who saw interest on their loans balloon over time, or who were still paying off loans after at least 20 years.

Even though the policy was not scheduled to go into effect until the fall, the states bringing the lawsuit argued that they had obtained evidence that the Education Department had notified federal contractors to “immediately” begin canceling some balances.

“Through cloak and dagger, the Department has thus finalized a rule with a rollout plan that is maximally designed to forgive tens or hundreds of billions of dollars without any judicial review and is designed to boost the incumbent Democratic presidential candidate two months before the election,” the complaint filed on Tuesday read.

A spokesman for the Education Department said in a statement that officials were reviewing the order and that the department had followed the normal rule-making process.