Student Loan Cancellation Update: Republicans Vote to Overturn Forgiveness

A House legislative committee has advanced legislation that could set the stage for Congress to overturn President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness policy after a decision by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) opened an avenue for a challenge earlier this spring.

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Education and the Workforce Committee advanced a resolution to invoke its authority under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to kill Biden's attempt to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt owed to the federal government.

The CRA authority outlined in the resolution—a move cleared in a March 17 ruling by the GAO—would allow a congressional majority in the House and Senate to overturn any rules established by any cabinet-level office if the administration did not first submit the rule to Congress for review. In this case, Republicans claim, that authority is warranted.

"I am pleased to lead the House effort to overturn President Biden's student loan transfer scheme that would burden the wallets of hardworking American taxpayers to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars," Representative Bob Good, a Virginia Republican who sponsored the resolution, told Fox News in a statement. "His plan to force American citizens to pay off the debts of others is unfair, unethical, unconstitutional and unlawful."

Newsweek reached out to Good's office for comment.

A similar bill resides in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and some Democratic senators, like West Virginia's Joe Manchin and Nevada's Catherine Cortez Masto, have expressed concerns with Biden's broad debt relief plan.

However, efforts to invoke the CRA are rarely successful—succeeding just 20 times since it was created in 1996—and would still be subject to a presidential veto.

The U.S. Department of Education has criticized Republican efforts to invoke the CRA, saying in a previous statement that such a move would hurt low- and medium-income wage earners who were already struggling financially.

"Republicans in Congress represent millions of borrowers who have applied for student debt relief," U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a March 27 statement. "It's a shame for these borrowers—the overwhelming majority of whom make less than $75,000 a year—and their families that their representatives are working so hard to deny them critical relief."

While the pause on student loan payments could deny the federal government an estimated $430 billion in payments, critics of the CRA claim that an immediate reversal of the proposal could push tens of millions of borrowers into unplanned repayment along with thousands of dollars in payments and interest being added back into their loans, causing an even greater shock to the system.

"Research has shown time and time again that ending the payment pause will be disastrous for borrowers, who are already barely able to make ends meet, without taking into consideration the financial havoc the pandemic has wreaked on household balance sheets across the country," the Student Borrower Protection Center wrote in an analysis criticizing the financial impacts of a potential invocation of the CRA in April.