Congress has the authority to forgive student loans but won’t do it, says a government professor

While borrowers await the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the legality of the president’s relief plan, some have called on Congress to enact debt cancelation.

And according to many higher education and policy experts, Congress does have the ability to cancel student loan debt (in fact, one of the arguments against Biden’s plan is that he is infringing on Congress’s authority). But that’s not going to happen any time soon, given the current make up of the legislative body, says Nicholas Jacobs, assistant professor of government at Colby College.

“It’s a political non-starter, especially after the president put his stamp so clearly on the process,” says Jacobs. “It is now wrapped up with the image of Joe Biden, and in this high-stakes, zero-sum political moment, Republicans will not give the president a win going into 2024.”

Widespread student loan forgiveness has become a priority for more progressive Democrats over the past few years, and in the lead up to the 2020 election, Biden campaigned on canceling some debt. Once his plan was finally unveiled last year, conservatives mounted legal challenges almost immediately. Though technically the plan stems from the U.S. Secretary of Education’s authority, Biden is the figurehead.

And that means it’s a no-go for Republicans. “President Biden’s so-called student loan forgiveness programs do not make the debt go away, but merely transfer the costs from student loan borrowers onto taxpayers to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars,” said Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., a typical party response.

Instead of blanket forgiveness, some Republican lawmakers have proposed requiring colleges to be more transparent about pricing and capping how much students can borrower.

But it’s also true that not all Democrats are on board with loan forgiveness. At the end of May, three moderate senators—Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.—voted with Republicans to nullify Biden’s plan, making it all but certain that Congress would forgive student loan debt if Democrats held the majority in both chambers (and in fact, Dems led the House and Senate during the first two years of Biden’s term but did not cancel any student loan debt).

Jacobs says the party’s inability to come together on the issue “undercuts the White House’s claim that the winners and losers of this policy are clear cut.”

“While student loan forgiveness attracts a lot of attention, the fact is that most Americans do not have student loans, and millions who did pay them back,” says Jacobs. “That just seems unfair and will continue to appear that way to many Americans.”

Like other experts and even advocates of forgiveness, Jacobs also says that forgiving some debt once does nothing to fix the over-arching issues with how America pays for college.

“What comes after debt relief? More debt relief?” he says. “Those who are serious about the economic burdens imposed by student loans have yet to really come together and find a way to lower the dependency on those loans in the first place.”