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Kansas launches challenge to federal student loan forgiveness. Missouri could be next

Katie Bernard, Daniel Desrochers and Kacen Bayless, The Kansas City Star on

Published in News & Features

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach filed a lawsuit Thursday aimed at blocking President Joe Biden’s latest attempt at forgiving billions in student loan debt for Americans.

Kobach is leading a coalition of 11 Republican attorneys general to challenge the plan, which the Biden administration has introduced through a series of programs over the last few months following a U.S. Supreme Court that struck down an earlier loan forgiveness plan that offered relief to a broader swath of borrowers.

“President Biden’s new student loan forgiveness plan is slightly smaller than the old one, at least for now. But it’s just as illegal,” Kobach said in a press conference announcing the lawsuit.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court alleges the Biden administration is overstepping its authority in proposing rules to wipe out debt for some Americans without express permission from Congress. If Biden is able to cancel this much debt through executive action, the lawsuit argues, he would be able to cancel all debt this way.

“As the Defendants scrape ever deeper into the barrel for legal pretexts to abolish student debts, the illegality of those artifices becomes more obvious,” the lawsuit says. “The authority that Defendants claim now lacks any substantive limits and amounts to claiming that they can abolish all student debt at any time by rulemaking alone.”

A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson said in a statement the department did not comment on pending litigation but added that the federal agency has the authority to define the terms of income-driven repayment plans.

 

“From day one, the Biden-Harris Administration has been fighting to fix a broken student loan system, and part of that is creating the most affordable student loan repayment plan ever that is lowering monthly payments, protecting millions of borrowers from runaway interest and getting borrowers closer to debt forgiveness faster,” the statement said.

“The Biden-Harris Administration won’t stop fighting to provide support and relief to borrowers across the country – no matter how many times Republican elected officials try to stop us.”

The Biden administration’s new plan to relieve student loan debt comes after Missouri played a central role in the Supreme Court’s decision to prevent the Biden administration from forgiving up to $30,000 in student loan debt for some Americans.

The earlier plan would have relieved 40 million Americans of all or some of their student loan debt, fulfilling a Biden campaign promise. The Biden administration’s SAVE Plan only applies to 153,000 borrowers who took out fewer than $12,000 in student loans and have been repaying it for more than a decade.

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