President Joe Biden wasted little time crafting new plans after the Supreme Court struck down his student loans plan.
Despite the court ruling his $430 billion debt transfer was illegal and Congress overturning it, the Biden administration rolled out a new action last week and promised to keep pushing through the 2024 elections.
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"President Biden continues to fight for student loan borrowers on all fronts," a White House official said in a background statement.
That plan includes what the Department of Education describes as an "adjustment" to the existing income-driven repayment program that results in $39 billion in canceled loans for 800,000 borrowers. While that is less than 10% of the dollar total of the original loan forgiveness scheme, the political result is largely the same — officials will tout their efforts to help borrowers while Republicans cry foul.
House Education and Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) immediately decried the latest move as a cynical campaign ploy, calling it "a desperate Hail Mary attempt to save his bid for reelection."
"It’s embarrassing, but more importantly, his willingness to ignore the Supreme Court and thumb his nose at the rule of law reveals a man who believes his power is absolute," Foxx said. "That is not someone who deserves to lead our great Republic."
The Biden administration has also indicated it is looking for other ways to enact broad student loan forgiveness, likely meaning the issue will remain a talking point for Democrats into 2024 and beyond.
Biden pledged during his successful 2020 presidential campaign to cancel student loan debt, though he spent his first 18 months in office saying Congress would need to move first.
Congress did eventually speak on the issue, overturning the student debt transfer in June. Biden vetoed that but was powerless to stop the Supreme Court from striking down the program later that month.
That hasn't stopped the White House from making other moves, including the new $39 billion program and talking about trying again for the $400-plus billion program using the Higher Education Act rather than the HEROES Act as a legal justification.
From a political standpoint, Biden has put the blame squarely on the Supreme Court.
"I didn’t give any false hope," he said June 30. "What I did, I thought, was appropriate and was able to be done and would get done. I didn’t give borrowers false hope. But the Republicans snatched away the hope that it was given."
The court defeat is part of a familiar pattern for Biden, especially when it comes to policies hatched in the pandemic. The White House has suffered numerous judicial setbacks ranging from its eviction moratorium to federal mask and vaccine mandates and southern border expulsion.
Foxx isn't alone in saying politics motives some of the decisions.
Student loan forgiveness was announced in late August 2022, just as early voting was beginning for the midterm elections, and it was blocked in court two days after the election ended. Even some progressives questioned the president's motives.
“They used the promise of student debt cancellation to induce young voter turn out — knowing it wasn’t going anywhere bc they relied on faulty legal authority,” former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Briahna Joy Gray tweeted at the time. “Hard to convince me the Biden admin didn’t do this intentionally.”
More recently, Boston University law professor Jed Shugerman said in comments to Slate that losing could have been by design.
"Frankly, if I’m being a little cynical here, I think maybe they took it [the Supreme Court threat] so seriously that it was part of their own political game plan," he said.
But the new, more limited $39 billion program is likely to survive, argues financial aid and student loan researcher Mark Kantrowitz.
“This program will satisfy legal scrutiny because Congress already authorized it,” he said. “The Republicans won’t be happy, but there’s nothing they can do about it.”
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Administration officials are openly discussing trying to revive the larger program using the Higher Education Act. That, Kantrowitz says, is unlikely to succeed, at least in court.
“There are more reasons why the Higher Education Act will fail than the HEROES Act attempt failed,” he said. “As far as a plan B, I think that’s being driven more by politics than policy. It provides hope ahead of the next election and establishes a sharp contrast between Democrats and Republicans.”