President Joe Biden is abandoning his effort to cancel student loans for more than 38 million Americans, the first step in an administration-wide plan to abandon pending regulations to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from retooling them for his own goals.
The White House expects to pull the incomplete rules across multiple agencies if there is not enough time to finalize them before Trump takes office. If the proposed regulations are left in their current state, the next administration will be able to rewrite them and advance their agenda more quickly.
Even as the Biden administration moved to withdraw the rules, it moved forward with repeal through other methods on Friday. The Education Department said it is settling loans for another 55,000 borrowers who reached eligibility through a program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which was created by Congress in 2007 and expanded by the Biden administration.
With Biden’s pending regulations withdrawn, there is nothing stopping Trump from pursuing his own regulations on the same issues when he returns to the White House, but he will have to start from scratch in a process that could take months or even years.
“This is not the way I wanted it to end,” said Melissa Byrne, an activist who pushed for student debt cancellation. “Unfortunately, this is the wisest action to take now.”
She blamed Republicans for putting the Biden administration in this position. “It is unfortunate that we have a Republican Party committed to keeping working-class Americans in debt,” Byrne said.
In documents withdrawing student loan proposals, the Education Department insisted it had the authority to cancel the debt but sought to focus on other priorities in the administration’s final weeks. She said the administration will focus on helping borrowers get back on track to make payments after the coronavirus pandemic, when payments were temporarily halted.
“At this time, the Department intends to devote its limited operational resources to helping at-risk borrowers successfully return to repayment,” the agency wrote.
The withdrawals begin as Washington braces for a potential government shutdown that could further complicate the Biden administration’s efforts to tie up loose ends.
Another proposed rule that could face pushback is a measure that would have prevented schools from issuing blanket bans against transgender athletes. Trump could rewrite a pending amendment to Title IX to ban transgender athletes from playing girls’ sports, one of his campaign promises.
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An administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the administration remains supportive of the goals of its regulatory proposals. However, the process can be lengthy because it requires legal reviews and gathering input from the public.
The official said federal agencies are now analyzing which rules need to be finalized and which rules need to be withdrawn before the end of Biden’s term.
In recent years, presidents have tended to rely more on executive orders and federal regulations to avoid gridlock in Congress. However, rulemaking can be less permanent than legislation, making policies more vulnerable to shifts between administrations.
There are dozens of other regulations pending across the Department of Education and other agencies, ranging from relatively trivial updates to sweeping policies that carry heavy implications for the nation’s schools and businesses.
If the rule had already undergone a public feedback process under Biden, Trump could simply replace it with his own proposal and move directly to enacting the policy, effectively bypassing the comment period.
The two student loan proposals expected to be withdrawn on Friday represent Biden’s second attempt at large-scale debt cancellation after the Supreme Court rejected his first plan.
One is that the proposal from April would have provided targeted debt relief to 30 million Americans. It has identified several categories of borrowers eligible for relief. Borrowers who saw their balances balloon due to interest would have had their accumulated interest wiped out. Those who had been repaying loans for 20 years or more would have had their loans erased.
That proposal was blocked by a federal judge in September after Republican-led states sued, and it remains tangled in a legal battle.
The second rule withdrawn is a proposal from October that would have allowed the Department of Education to cancel loans for people facing various types of hardships, including those with exorbitant medical bills or child care costs.
Although Biden never achieved the comprehensive loan forgiveness he initially promised, his administration forgave an unprecedented $180 billion in federal student loans through existing programs.
“Because of our actions, millions of people across the country now have an outlet to start businesses, save for retirement, and pursue life plans they had to postpone due to the burden of student loan debt,” Biden said in a statement. .
On Friday, officials announced they were canceling the debt of another 55,000 workers — including teachers, nurses and law enforcement officials — through public service loan forgiveness. The program promises to forgive loans for borrowers who spend 10 years in government or nonprofit jobs.
The $4.28 billion in relief is expected to be the final round of public service loan forgiveness before Biden leaves office in January.
Biden’s rule on transgender sports was proposed in 2023 but has been postponed several times. It was meant to be a follow-up to his broader rule that expanded civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students under Title IX.
The athletic rule would have prevented schools from outright banning transgender athletes while allowing limits for certain reasons — for example, if it was about “fairness” in competition or to reduce the risk of injury.
It remained on the back burner during the presidential campaign as the issue became the subject of Republican ire. Trump campaigned on a promise to ban transgender athletes, with a promise to “keep men out of women’s sports.”
& Edition 2024 The Canadian Press
