In a pair of challenges to student-debt relief, big questions about agency authority and the right to sue
on Feb 13, 2023 at 6:50 pm
While campaigning for president in 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden pledged to cancel at least $10,000 in federal student-loan debt for each borrower. More than two years later, Biden announced a debt-relief program that would forgive up to $20,000 in loans for borrowers who qualify. On Feb. 28, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a pair of challenges to the program.
With a price tag for the program estimated at $400 billion, the justices’ ruling will obviously have a significant practical and economic effect. But the court’s decision could also have a legal impact well beyond this case, as the justices weigh issues such as when states can go to court to contest federal policies and how courts should interpret laws giving power to federal agencies.
Loan relief, the HEROES Act, and the path to the Supreme Court
When the justices hear arguments later this month, student-loan repayments will have been on hold for nearly three years. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos suspended both repayments and the accrual of interest on federal student loans. She relied on the HEROES Act, a law passed after 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 “placed in a worse position financially” because of the national emergency.
Both the Trump administration and the Biden administration later extended the original repayment pause. In August 2022, the Biden administration announced both that it would end the pause and that it would cancel up to $10,000 in federal loans for borrowers who meet income limits; borrowers who also received Pell Grants, which are available for undergraduate students from low-income families, can have up to $20,000 in federal loans canceled. Again relying on the HEROES Act, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona explained that the program was a response to the economic effects of the pandemic and would provide relief to borrowers who are more likely to default on their loan repayments because of the pandemic.
Two different challenges to the debt-relief program are now before the Supreme Court. The first case, Biden v. Nebraska, was filed by six states with Republican attorneys general. They argued that the HEROES Act does not give the secretary of education the power to implement the debt-relief program
