Joe Biden's controversial efforts to forgive student loans have once again been blocked in federal court.
A year after the Supreme Court shut down his initial sweeping plan, two federal courts in Missouri and Kansas blocked Biden's second attempt - the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program.
In an interesting turn of events, the judges who blocked SAVE were both appointed by Barack Obama.
The SAVE Plan is an income-based repayment plan that has seen roughly $5.5 billion in loans forgiven.
SAVE cuts payments down to 10% of discretionary income for most enrollees. The poorest borrowers pay nothing.
Borrowers with under $12,000 in debt remaining would have all debt forgiven after 10 years of payments, an accelerated timeline compared to the usual 20 or 25 years under income-based plans.
Starting in July, SAVE would have reduced payments even further to 5% for most borrowers, but the courts blocked that part. The rulings will not impact debts already forgiven, but they do block Biden from forgiving additional debt.
The challenge to SAVE was led by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, both Republicans. They blasted Biden's plan as a wealth transfer from working-class people to college-educated, left-leaning voters.
"Blue collar Kansas workers who didn’t go to college shouldn’t have to pay off the student loans of New Yorkers with gender studies degrees," Kobach said.
"Congress never gave Biden the authority to saddle working Americans with half-a-trillion dollars in other people’s debt," Bailey wrote on X. “A huge win for the Constitution."
The court rulings throw a wrench into Biden's efforts to deliver on a 2020 campaign promise to forgive student debt. Awkwardly, the Biden administration is blaming Republicans for the rulings against SAVE, despite the fact that both judges - Daniel Crabtree in Kansas and John Ross in Missouri, - are Obama appointees.
“The Biden-Harris Administration’s SAVE Plan is the most affordable repayment plan in history,” Biden's Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said.
“But Republican elected officials and special interests sued to block their own constituents from being able to benefit from this plan - even though the Department has relied on the authority under the Higher Education Act three times over the last 30 years to implement income-driven repayment plans.”
"We will continue to provide this long-overdue relief, no matter how many times Republican elected officials and their allies try to stop us,” he added.
