The White House is considering extending the pause on student loan debt payments following a ruling by a federal appeals court that put on hold President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debts, The Washington Post is reporting.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit issued on Monday an injunction preventing the administration from forgiving up to $20,000 in student loan debt. Last week, a judge in Texas ruled the program was unlawful.
The ruling comes as Biden’s plan has faced six lawsuits.
Biden announced the student loan forgiveness program in August. The plan would allow an estimated 40 million borrowers who held federally backed student loans and fell within certain income limits to receive loan forgiveness of up to $10,000 or up to $20,000 if the loan was a Pell Grant.
The Post reported that talks concerning the idea of extending the loan payment pause until the legal issues surrounding the debt forgiveness plan had been settled, were preliminary. The pause on federally backed student loan payments began during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is unclear if Biden has been involved in the talks to extend the pause on payments, the Post reported.
“As the legal vulnerability has become clearer and clearer, the White House has been making increasingly firm plans to extend the loan repayment pause,” one of the people familiar with the matter told the Post.
“The extension we’re likely to see is meant to make sure borrowers don’t have the rug pulled out from under them, rather than an indefinite replacement for loan forgiveness.”
While no Republican has yet weighed in on the idea of extending the pause, in a statement to The Hill last week, Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the top Republican on the House Committee on Education and Labor, said she expected the legal challenges against the program to prevail.
“The Biden administration’s $400 billion wealth transfer is grossly unfair and Republicans will do everything we can to stop this abusive power grab, fix our broken student loan program, and lower the cost of college for students, families, and taxpayers,” she said.