The Biden Administration has stretched its pause on federal student loan payments until June, after lawsuits blocked his forgiveness plan earlier this month.
In a video posted to Twitter on Tuesday, President Joe Biden explained the reasoning behind the halt and called out Republican officials for obstructing the plan.
“Republican special interests and elected officials sued to deny this relief even for their own constituents,” Biden said in the video. “It isn’t fair to ask tens of millions of borrowers eligible for relief to resume their student debt payments while the courts consider the lawsuit.”
Originally set to resume in January, the pause will now expire on June 30, 2023. The extension comes as Biden’s student loan administration program faces hot water from lawsuits and Republican officials, who have called the debt relief program “unlawful.”
“In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone,” wrote U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman of Fort Worth, in his decision to vacate Biden’s plan earlier in November. “Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government.
The decision came after a lawsuit accused the plan of unreasonably excluding two federal student loan borrowers who did not qualify for the debt relief program and accused the Biden Administration of violating the Administration Procedures Act (APA) for not holding a comment period when announcing the new program. Biden’s Administration has since countered this argument, stating that the HEROES Act of 2003 waives any need for one.
In his video on Tuesday, Biden said he is “completely confident” that his plan is legal. The debt relief program would wipe out $10,000 in federal student loan debt for individuals earning less than $125,000 per year and $20,000 for those who received Pell grants during college.
Since announcing the program in August, over 26 million people have applied for relief and 16 million people have been approved. Due to court orders, the DOE has since stopped accepting applications.
In the case that U.S. courts make a final decision on the state of Biden’s forgiveness plan before then, payments will then resume 60 days after the verdict is made, said the Department of Education (DOE) in a press statement. If the courts have not resolved the case by the June 30 deadline, payments will resume 60 days after, in September 2023.
This is now the ninth extension on student loan payments since it began in March 2020 as a pandemic relief effort under former President Donald Trump, and the sixth extension by Biden.