President Biden’s 60 Minutes Interview Leaves his Student Loan Forgiveness Plan Vulnerable in Court

Heroes Act can no longer be used as Biden declares pandemic ‘over’

Ric Edelman: You're listening to The Truth About Your Future. Well, the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, which is the nonpartisan organization that provides Congress information about its spending, says that the president's student loan forgiveness plan is going to cost $400 billion over 30 years. The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business Model says it's actually going to cost $600 billion over 10 years and could actually hit a trillion dollars. Both of these reports say there are way too many variables for them to be able to say for sure what the actual costs are going to be. So it looks like it's going to be somewhere between $400 billion and a trillion over the next one to three decades. And none of this is factored into the president's budget or that of Congress. Now, here's something you need to understand about this. In order to qualify for the loan forgiveness, it's only available for individuals earning less than $125,000 a year. Married couples, $250,000 a year. By the way, that's one of the big reasons that so many people are opposed to this. Do people earning $250,000 really need to have $10,000 of student loans forgiven? It's kind of ridiculous.

Ric: Meanwhile, there's a lot of opposition. As I said, nearly half of the state's governors have signed a letter to the president asking him to cancel the whole thing outright. And six states have now sued: Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Carolina, plus an attorney in Indiana. They have all filed lawsuits saying that Biden's plan should be thrown out of court. And simply based on what I've been reading and what I have seen the president saying, it looks like, in fact, the courts will throw this plan out. You see, he said on 60 Minutes that the pandemic is over. Now, what does that have to do with the student loan plan? Well, the pandemic was the president's legal basis for the student loan forgiveness program. You see, back after 9/11, Congress passed the Heroes Act. And under that law, it says that the secretary of education can waive student debts during a war or a national emergency. Well, there's no war right now, but COVID sure was a national emergency, and that gave President Biden cover for his plan. But he said on 60 Minutes just a couple of months ago that COVID's over. Here's what the president said on 60 Minutes:

President Biden: The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over.

Ric: That means he can no longer use the Heroes Act to justify his waiver of the student debt. And that's part of the basis for these lawsuits: that the president did not have the legal authority to do what he's trying to do. Also, his forgiveness plan is creating lots of opportunities for fraud and deception. It's also encouraging students to take on more debt than they could ever repay. So we're seeing a lot of issues, a lot of challenges. I would not at all be surprised to see this entire idea thrown out in court. And quite frankly. I'll drink a toast when that happens.