Biden’s Attempt to Save Student Debt Bailout From Court Challenges Won’t Work: Legal Scholar

The Biden administration’s abrupt change of course in its federal student loan debt “forgiveness” scheme is not going to help keep challengers out of court, said legal scholar GianCarlo Canaparo.

“It went wrong from the very start,” Canaparo, a senior legal fellow at conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, said in an interview with NTD News. “[President Joe Biden] has pinned this to the COVID-19 emergency, although he has just said we are no longer in a pandemic.”

The U.S. Education Department is planning to “forgive” up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt for eligible borrowers. It was originally expected to cover about 43 million Americans, but the department announced last week that privately held loans will be excluded from the relief plan.

According to the latest estimate from the department, the price tag of the plan now stands at about $30 billion each year over the next 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan research arm of the Congress, previously estimated that the one-time relief would cost $400 billion of taxpayers’ money over 30 years.

The decision to cut out potentially millions of people from the plan, Canaparo said, shows that the debt cancellation wasn’t about supporting Americans who have suffered financial harm from the COVID-19 pandemic in the first place.

“It only proves that this has nothing to do with the pandemic,” Canaparo told NTD. “The moment that the Biden administration noticed that there were some people who might get into court, it stopped and said that it won’t forgive a certain segment of loans, because it thinks that will keep the challengers out of court.”

The attorneys general of six Republican-led states—Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina—have filed a lawsuit (pdf) seeking to block the plan, which they argue would cause economic harm to their

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