On November 22, The Biden Administration issued yet another extension on the requirement to pay back student loans, and this time there are some notable asterisks.
This extension comes after one of the many Republican-led legal challenges actually stuck, forcing the administration to stop dispersing debt relief immediately. Giving the debt relief time to work through the courts (all the way to the Supreme Court), President Biden announced what will happen to the tens of millions of payments stopped and those in a forbearance period (0% interest).
Instead of the payment period restarting on January 1, 2023 as scheduled, it will resume 60 days after the Supreme Court makes a decision or on June 30, 2023, whichever comes first. While the two major cases that have made the most ground in stopping the debt relief seem to be based on flimsy legal reasoning (I’m not a lawyer, admittedly), this could be the beginning of the end of our hopes for vital debt relief for these borrowers, let alone the millions more that were cheated out of relief due to unclear messaging and an arbitrary income cap.
The heavy conservative majority in a broken Supreme Court will likely side against the administration. Plus, the summer tends to yield lower infection rates of COVID-19. This is good, obviously, but it’s worth noting because nearly every payment extension so far has been issued as COVID-19 emergency relief. Ideally, the very outwardly optimistic Biden Administration is working on other avenues to get serious relief to students that are even stronger than before—meaning fewer people are left behind! Also, we not only need serious relief, but for our political leaders to address the (many) roots of the problem as to why student debt is affecting people as severely as medical debt (which shouldn’t exist) and mortgages.
(via The Washington Post, featured image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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