On Thursday Nebraska and five other states filed a challenge to the Biden Administration’s student loan cancellation program in federal court in Missouri.
They are asking the Court for an immediate temporary restraining order pausing the program. Prompt relief is being sought because the Biden Administration has indicated it will start canceling loan balances as early as next week.
Just a few months ago, the Supreme Court warned federal agencies against “asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted” by statute. The six states filing the challenge say the Biden Administration’s recently announced student loan cancellation program—the Mass Debt Cancellation—does precisely that.
“In addition to being economically unwise and inherently unfair, the Biden Administration’s Mass Debt Cancellation is another example in a long line of unlawful regulatory actions,” the six Attorneys General said in a statement. “No statute permits President Biden to unilaterally relieve millions of individuals from their obligation to pay loans they voluntarily assumed.”
They also state that “this burden of economic loss will do little to benefit the working class and the poor. The majority of the Mass Debt Cancellation will accrue to the debt borrowers in the top 60 percent of the income distribution. It is fundamentally unfair for those who can least afford it to provide through their tax dollars relief to the well-off who can afford to pay their own loans.”
States joining in the filing are Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina.