Supreme Court kills Biden’s student debt plan in a setback for millions of borrowers

VPM | By Nina Totenberg and Meghanlata Gupta

Published June 30, 2023 at 2:36 PM EDT

The Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, June 27 as the term heads into what's expected to be the final week.

Updated June 30, 2023 at 10:42 AM ET

Follow NPR’s live coverage for the latest updates and reaction to this opinion.

In a highly anticipated decision, the Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Biden’s groundbreaking plan to forgive some or all federal student loan debt for tens of millions of Americans.

By a 6-to-3 vote on ideological lines, the high court ruled that federal law does not authorize the Department of Education to cancel such student loan debt.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said: “The authority to ‘modify’ statutes and regulations allows the Secretary to make modest adjustments and additions to existing provisions, not transform them.”

Siding with the states, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, in her concurring opinion, said the major questions doctrine “reinforces” the majority’s conclusion “but is not necessary to it.”

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan criticized the court’s “overreach, and noted she would have decided the states didn’t have the right to sue.

“The plaintiffs in this case are six States that have no personal stake in the Secretary’ loan forgiveness plan,” she said. “They are classic ideological plaintiffs: They think the plan a very bad idea, but they are no worse off because the Secretary differs.”

Last August, President Biden told federal student loan borrowers that the U.S. government would cancel up to $20,000 of debt for low income students who had received a Pell Grant to attend college, and up to $10,000 for the vast majority of remaining borrowers. He cited a 2001 law that allows the Secretary of Education “to alleviate the hardship that federal student loan recipients may suffer as a result of national emergencies.” That is the same law that President Trump used to freeze federal student loan payments and interest accrual due to the COVID pandemic.

Soon after Biden’s announcement, however, six states filed a lawsuit to stop the implementation of the debt cancellation plan, arguing that Biden exceeded his authority under the federal law. The Supreme Court ultimately stepped in to review the case.

The high court’s ruling signifies another example of its expanding use of the “Major Questions Doctrine,” the idea that Congress must speak very clearly when granting power to executive agencies like the Department of Education to make decisions about issues that are politically or economically significant. And, as the doctrine says, if there is any ambiguity to whether Congress has granted this power, courts should not presume that Congress did so. Last year, the high court struck down the Secretary of Labor’s vaccine mandate on these grounds.

The decision comes as a disappointment to federal student loan borrowers who were eligible for relief under the plan — as many as 43 million borrowers, or roughly 1 in 8 Americans.

Come fall, student loan interest accrual and payments will begin again, affecting borrowers in all 50 states.

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Nina Totenberg

Nina Totenberg is NPR's award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Her reports air regularly on NPR's critically acclaimed newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition.

Totenberg's coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs has won her widespread recognition. She is often featured in documentaries — most recently RBG — that deal with issues before the court. As Newsweek put it, "The mainstays [of NPR] are Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the creme de la creme is Nina Totenberg."

In 1991, her ground-breaking report about University of Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill's charges. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage — anchored by Totenberg — of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Anita Hill's allegations, and for Totenberg's reports and exclusive interview with Hill.

That same coverage earned Totenberg additional awards, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for excellence in journalism; the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting; the Carr Van Anda Award from the Scripps School of Journalism; and the prestigious Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting, which also acknowledged her coverage of Justice Thurgood Marshall's retirement.

Totenberg was named Broadcaster of the Year and honored with the 1998 Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the National Press Foundation. She is the first radio journalist to receive the award. She is also the recipient of the American Judicature Society's first-ever award honoring a career body of work in the field of journalism and the law. In 1988, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations. The jurors of the award stated, "Ms. Totenberg broke the story of Judge (Douglas) Ginsburg's use of marijuana, raising issues of changing social values and credibility with careful perspective under deadline pressure."

Totenberg has been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for continued excellence in legal reporting and has received more than two dozen honorary degrees. On a lighter note, Esquire magazine twice named her one of the "Women We Love."

A frequent contributor on TV shows, she has also written for major newspapers and periodicals — among them, The New York Times Magazine, The Harvard Law Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and New York Magazine, and others.

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