Upon being told last week by the U.S. Supreme Court that it cannot just "forgive" student loan debt for borrowers up to certain amounts, the White House announced proposals like a legal workaround to debt forgiveness, an income-driven repayment plan, and what the administration has called an "on-ramp" to help the people who have not been making payments because of the COVID pandemic resume those efforts.
Carson Steelman of Heritage Action, the political arm of The Heritage Foundation, says this is just more of the same.
"After the Supreme Court ruling, it's very obvious that Biden's plan to try and bail out student debt was a clear overreach by this administration," she says. "These authorities, as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself even pointed out, belong to Congress. Now, as we see the Biden administration try to jam the same thing, just in a different way, again on the American people, they're going to keep running into the same problem."
Steelman reiterates that the executive branch cannot bypass Congress, and there is not path forward in Congress for a student debt bailout scheme because "it's unpopular with the American people, it's regressive, [and] it's expensive."
One of the reasons why the 2022 student loan forgiveness plan was unpopular was because people knew it would be on the backs of workers who already paid off their student loans, as well as on those who opted not to go to college.
Meanwhile, it never addressed the big problem of why college is so expensive.
With this plan falling flat, Steelman predicts President Biden will now turn it into a political play ahead of 2024.
