ST. LOUIS (CN) — Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey led a multi-state coalition by filing a federal lawsuit on Tuesday pushing back on President Joe Biden’s latest attempt at student loan relief.
Bailey, a Republican, challenges Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan — an income-based program that calculates student loan repayments based on a borrower’s income and family size, rather than their loan balance. It also forgives remaining balances after a certain number of years.
“With the stroke of his pen, Joe Biden is attempting to saddle working Missourians with a half trillion dollars in college debt,” Bailey said in a statement announcing the suit. “The United States Constitution makes clear that the President lacks the authority to unilaterally ‘cancel’ student loan debt for millions of Americans without express permission from Congress. The President does not get to thwart the Constitution when it suits his political agenda.”
The Biden administration — in announcing the plan in August 2023 after a previous attempt at student loan forgiveness was declared unconstitutional — claimed the benefits of the SAVE plan will be particularly critical for low and middle-income borrowers, community college students and borrowers who work in public service.
But Bailey says, in the lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of Missouri, that the SAVE plan “is only the most recent instance in a long but troubling pattern of the President relying on innocuous language from decades-old statutes to impose drastic, costly policy changes on the American people without their consent.”
Bailey begins the 62-page lawsuit by pointing out Biden’s attempts at vaccine mandates and “backbreaking” energy regulations as a pattern of attempting to abuse his power.
“Just last year, the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the President to force teachers, truckers and farmers to pay for the student loan debt of other Americans — to the enormous tune of $430 billion,” Bailey said in the lawsuit. “In striking down that attempt, the Court declared that the President cannot ‘unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy.’”
Unlike Biden’s previous attempt of student loan forgiveness struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023, the SAVE plan is narrower, focusing on several categories of borrowers who can get some or all of their loans canceled.
But Bailey — along with attorneys general from Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma — still isn’t buying it.
“The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania estimates the economic cost of the President’s newest rule at $475 billion across 10 years, $45 billion more than the program struck down by the Supreme Court … Others estimate the total economic cost as even higher, more than $1 trillion — more than double the cost of the program declared unlawful last summer,” Bailey said in his lawsuit.
Bailey asks a federal judge to halt the implementation of the program that is set to begin July 1, 2024.
“By usurping Congressional authority to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars (if not more), and flouting the Supreme Court, Defendants seek to strike a blow to the Constitution’s very structure and centralize power within the executive alone,” Bailey said.
A Department of Education spokesperson said it doesn’t comment on pending litigation, but did affirm the SAVE plan’s benefits in an emailed statement.
“Congress gave the US Department of Education the authority to define the terms of income-driven repayment plans in 1993, and the SAVE plan is the fourth time the Department has used that authority,” the department said. “From day one, the Biden-Harris Administration has been fighting to fix a broken student loan system, and part of that is creating the most affordable student loan repayment plan ever that is lowering monthly payments, protecting millions of borrowers from runaway interest and getting borrowers closer to debt forgiveness faster.”
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