Joe Biden inaugurated his long-promised student loan forgiveness programme with a prediction that he will beat back a series of legal challenges against it.
The US president in August outlined a plan to cancel up to $20,000 (£18,000) per person in student debt, at an estimated cost of nearly $380 billion, drawing widespread protests from Republicans including a series of courtroom challenges.
The administration in recent weeks has reduced the number of eligible borrowers to head off some of the legal arguments that have been raised by opponents. But in announcing the formal opening of a government website to process the loan cancellations, Mr Biden expressed confidence that the lawsuits would not block the overall programme.
“Our legal judgment is that it won’t,” the president told reporters at the White House.
The president was joined by the US education secretary, Miguel Cardona, who offered his own assurances that the administration would also figure out a way to extend the forgiveness plan to borrowers with privately held loans.
“We are working on pathways there,” Dr Cardona said, referring to older borrowers from the system that existed before 2010, when the federal government subsidised the loans and guaranteed the repayment but had the money issued and managed by private banks. Since then, the government has handled the process itself.
Mr Biden announced the student loan forgiveness plan in August, after a long assessment of his 2020 campaign promise on the matter, saying it would benefit more than 43 million borrowers.
Government prosecutors in several Republican-led states, and private groups backed by Republican lawmakers, have filed lawsuits, disputing the president’s right to take such an action based in large part on his contention that the Covid pandemic constituted a sufficient emergency.
The administration’s reduction in eligibility, to undercut the lawsuits, hit heaviest among the several million borrowers from the era of lending through private banks – who could argue that they will suffer financial harm from the forgiveness plan.
Promising to help such borrowers, Dr Cardona told the White House event: “We’re moving as quickly as possible to provide relief to as many people as possible.” Congress also passed a bill this month letting divorced couples who combined their student loans while married to now separate those debts, clearing an obstacle to forgiveness for 14,000 borrowers.
Mr Biden, meanwhile, castigated his Republican critics for endorsing and even personally accepting pandemic relief in some circumstances while fighting it in the case of student borrowers. “Their outrage is wrong and it’s hypocritical,” he said.
Some progressives, however, also have raised concern about the debt forgiveness plan, as it has only partial sensitivity to wealth. The plan provides $10,000 per person in student debt forgiveness, limited to borrowers now earning less than $125,000 a year, with the forgiveness level doubled to $20,000 for those borrowers who had been eligible for a Pell Grant, the main federal subsidy for low-income students.
Despite the opposition within both parties, Mr Biden does appear to be getting some political value from the debt forgiveness programme, with polling showing a strong majority of Americans in favour of it headed into the congressional elections in two weeks.
Before then, a federal judge in Missouri is considered likely to rule in an initial stage of a major court challenge of the Biden student debt forgiveness plan – on the question of whether to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the programme pending further legal review – in the case brought by the attorneys general of six Republican-led states.
