- Biden's new student-debt relief plan might not be implemented until July 2025.
- The education secretary could choose early implementation, but he has not yet indicated he will do so.
President Joe Biden's Education Department is in the midst of crafting a new student-loan forgiveness plan for federal borrowers. But its implementation timeline, and the 2024 election, raise some red flags about the future of the relief.
It's possible Biden's new plan for debt relief wouldn't be carried out until 2025, meaning a Republican candidate for president could win the election and push Biden's relief efforts to the side.
The Supreme Court struck down Biden's first plan to cancel student debt broadly in June, ruling that the education secretary does not have the authority to get rid of debt for millions of Americans using the HEROES Act of 2003, which allows debt to be waived or modified in connection with a national emergency, like COVID-19. The same day as the high court's ruling, the Education Department launched its new plan: student-debt relief under the Higher Education Act of 1965.
The Higher Education Act has stricter requirements for implementation than the HEROES Act. Before any relief can be granted, the administration must go through the negotiated rulemaking process, which requires a series of negotiation sessions with stakeholders, opportunities for public comment, and review by the Office of Management and Budget.
The department held its first two-day negotiation session on October 10 and 11, and the department's negotiator Tamy Abernathy clarified when borrowers can expect to benefit from the final debt relief rule. She said the department is held to the master calendar — a federal timeline the education secretary must adhere to when it comes to establishing new policies — which means rules would be implemented by July 1, 2025, "unless the secretary exercised his authority for early implementation," Abernathy said.
"And when we would draft the notice of the final rule, we would include an implementation schedule at that time," she said. The Higher Education Act permits the secretary to implement a final rule ahead of schedule — for example, the department enacted early implementation of Biden's new SAVE income-driven repayment plan.
However, it's unclear at this point if the department will do so with this new student-debt relief plan, leaving the possibility open that it is not implemented before the 2024 presidential election.
"If this cancellation was going to be pushed into 2025, I know that there are a lot of people who are very upset that they didn't get the Biden forgiveness and it's turned them off to voting, which I'm terrified of," Ashley Pizzuti, one of the negotiators representing student-loan borrowers, said during the October session. "And so I'm wondering where the department stands as far as timeline goes and how quickly they are willing to act on rolling some of these initiatives out."
Where GOP candidates stand on student-debt relief
If any of the GOP candidates win the 2024 election, their past comments are a strong indicator of how they would approach relief for student-loan borrowers. Additionally, it's highly unlikely they would finish what Biden's Education Department started.
Former President Donald Trump — the Republican frontrunner to defeat Biden next year — posted a statement on his website in July saying that the Supreme Court striking down student-loan forgiveness was "only made possible through President Trump's strong nomination of three distinguished and courageous jurists to the Supreme Court." Trump also previously called Biden's first debt relief plan an "election enhancing money grab."
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said last August that if student-loan borrowers are "not able to make enough money to pay it back, well then that's on them."
"It's very unfair, you know, to have a truck driver have to pay back a loan for somebody that got, like, a PhD in gender studies. That's not fair. That's not right," he said during a news conference.
Vivek Ramaswamy, another GOP candidate, called Biden's debt relief efforts a "disaster" that "forces every citizen to pay for anti-American gender-studies majors." Meanwhile, Trump's Vice President Mike Pence lauded the Supreme Court decision to strike down Biden's broad relief.
However, if Biden does win a second term, his plan for debt relief could run into more legal hurdles, potentially stalling its implementation even longer.