President Joe Biden has been dogged by controversy since wading into the complicated politics of student debt forgiveness early in his term, occasionally forcing members of his own party to run away from him in order to keep their seats.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, might have just given him an easy out.
On Friday, the conservative-majority court voted 6-3 to overturn his administration's student loan debt cancellation plan, effectively bringing the COVID-era relief program to a close. But it also gives Biden a scapegoat to lean in to following two consecutive campaign seasons in which student loan debt forgiveness was a top issue for younger voters seen as crucial to Democrats' success in 2024.
For younger Americans, the promise of student loan debt forgiveness was seen as key to their support in the 2020 and 2022 midterm elections amid a mounting dialogue around rising tuition costs and stagnant wages that critics said made paying back the loans a challenge.
Among 1,500 voters polled by the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) after the 2022 midterms, 51 percent said student debt relief was either the only reason they voted or was very or somewhat motivating in their decision to go to the polls. Among voters under age 30, more than three-quarters of all voters surveyed claimed student debt relief was a motivating factor behind their decision to vote.
And reforms were popular. According to a May 2022 survey of 1,110 likely voters across the U.S. by the SBPC and Data for Progress, just 34 percent of respondents said they believed no student loan debt should be eliminated. The rest supported outright or limited debt relief.
However, Biden's decision to use executive action to implement the program became a lightning rod of controversy, eliciting multiple legal challenges from conservative state attorneys general who believed the program could lead to significant shortfalls in their state lending programs.
On Capitol Hill, members of both parties became regular critics of the plan, arguing that the significant cost of the program—as much as $430 billion over the next 30 years, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office—could exacerbate inflation while leading to significant costs for taxpayers because of the loss in revenues.
And while some candidates in close races—Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia and Democratic Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman—leaned into student loan debt forgiveness in their campaigns last year, the policy also became an electoral liability for some Democrats in tough races in the 2022 midterms, forcing some members of Biden's party to run against the policy.
Prior to the midterms, polling averages compiled by the Morning Consult found only tepid support for student debt cancellation among independent voters and little support among Republicans, leading figures like Nevada Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and former Ohio U.S. Senate candidate Tim Ryan to oppose the program in favor of bipartisan alternatives that took a more holistic view of addressing the college affordability crisis.
"We should be focusing on passing my legislation to expand Pell Grants for lower income students, target loan forgiveness to those in need, and actually make college more affordable for working families," Cortez Masto said in a statement at the time.
Biden, however, might not be out of the woods yet.
While Congress has weighed reforms to address the student debt crisis outside of outright cancellation, activist organizations like the 50,000-member Debt Collective have already begun pushing Biden to exploit provisions in the nearly 60-year-old Higher Education Act to forgive student debt as a means of making up for his administration's failures to implement the program, insisting he will continue to have the ability to take executive action to forgive—or at least delay—people's debts.
The Supreme Court's decision, Debt Collective press secretary Braxton Brewington told Newsweek Thursday morning, "would not be an out" for Biden. In fact, it could be a catalyst for even more pressure.
"This was a campaign promise," said Brewington. "And this isn't hypothetical anymore. He's announced a policy and tried to start implementing it. Millions of people have been approved. They've gotten notifications from the Department of Education saying 'your debt has been approved for relief.' And I am willing to bet that those people have made financial life decisions based around that notification."
He continued: "I don't know if we've ever seen an administration lean so hard into a policy and then back out. It would be it would be disastrous. I don't think anyone would buy it."
Others criticized Biden's Department of Education online for its messaging ahead of the ruling, including an ill-timed post advertising the contact information for a federal suicide helpline.
"Beyond...dark that this is the DoE's messaging ahead of Biden's plans to restart student loan payments & ahead of the expected Supreme Court decision on the already-insufficient $20k debt relief plan," one Twitter user wrote. "This country is a nightmare."
Biden is likely to face additional pressure in the coming days. At this point, his administration has not indicated whether it will pursue alternatives to extend the debt relief program, while some organizations have already announced plans to lobby for him to act.
Other groups, including the million-member Progressive Change Campaign Committee, already had a mobilization campaign lined up ahead of the decision, aiming to bombard the White House with emails and phone calls demanding an alternative approach, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday.
Other organizations such as the NAACP have made preparations to hold demonstrations in Washington intended to pressure the White House to act. But on Capitol Hill, some lawmakers have already expressed some concern borrowers may not pay back their loans even if forced to by the Court, prompting calls from Congress for Biden's Department of Education to begin laying the groundwork for a return to the status quo.
A joint letter from Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee ranking member Bill Cassidy and House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx earlier this week said lawmakers were growing "concerned about recent reports in the press that students are being encouraged not to make payments on their student loans once the return to repayment has begun." They called on the Education Department to prepare a plan to transition borrowers back to regular payments.
"As you are aware, all student loans include terms whereby borrowers agree to repay their student loans," they wrote. "We expect you and senior officers of the Department to exercise leadership in countering such efforts wherever and whenever they occur, particularly since nonpayment will lead to negative financial consequences for borrowers and barriers to future financial opportunities."
Newsweek has reached out to the White House press office via email for comment.
