A federal appeals court put a temporary, administrative hold on President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, barring the administration from canceling loans covered under the policy, while the court considers a challenge to it.
The order from the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals comes in a case brought by six Republican-led states, asking for a preliminary injunction to halt the policy after a district court dismissed the case earlier this week. The effort is separate from a Wisconsin taxpayers group’s challenge to the program that was recently rejected by the Supreme Court.
The appeals court gave the administration until Monday to respond to the states’ request, and the states will have until Tuesday to reply to that response. The states had asked the appeals court to act before Sunday, the earliest date the Biden administration had said it would grant student loan discharges.
In response to the pause, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre encouraged borrowers to apply for relief, saying that the administration would “continue to move full speed ahead in our preparations in compliance with this order,” and fight back against Republican legal efforts to the program.
“Tonight’s temporary order does not prevent borrowers from applying for student debt relief at studentaid.gov – and we encourage eligible borrowers to join the nearly 22 million Americans whose information the Department of Education already has. It also does not prevent us from reviewing these applications and preparing them for transmission to loan servicers.”
The lawsuit, which was filed last month, was dismissed on October 20 by a lower court judge who ruled that the plaintiffs did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.
In another win for Biden that same day, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to refer the challenge from the Wisconsin taxpayers group to the full court.
The Biden administration is also facing lawsuits from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and conservative groups such as the Job Creators Network Foundation and the Cato Institute.
Many of the legal challenges claim that the Biden administration does not have the legal authority to broadly cancel student loan debt.
Lawyers for the government argue that Congress gave the secretary of education the power to discharge debt in a 2003 law known as the HEROES Act.
The Biden administration’s plan
Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, first announced in August, aims to deliver debt relief to millions of borrowers before federal student loan payments resume in January after a nearly three-year, pandemic-related pause.
Under Biden’s plan, eligible individual borrowers who earned less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021 and married couples or heads of households who made less than $250,000 annually in those years will see up to $10,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven.
If a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual is eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness.
This story has been updated with additional details Friday.