President Joe Biden abandons efforts to cancel student loans for more than 38 million Americans, the first step in an administration-wide plan to scrap pending regulations aimed at preventing President-elect Donald Trump to re-equip them to achieve its own objectives.
The White House hopes to withdraw unfinished rules from several agencies if it does not have enough time to finalize them before Trump takes office. If the proposed regulations were left as they are, the next administration would be able to rewrite them and advance its agenda more quickly.
Even if the Biden administration decides to relax the rules, it continued the rollback through other avenues on Friday. The Education Department said it is providing loans to another 55,000 borrowers who became eligible through a program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, created by Congress in 2007 and expanded by the Biden administration .
While the pending Biden regulations are withdrawn, nothing stops Trump from pursuing his own regulations on the same issues when he returns to the White House, but he would have to start from scratch in a process that could take months or even years .
“This is not how I wanted this to end,” said Melissa Byrne, an activist who has pushed for student debt cancellation. “Unfortunately, this is the most prudent action to take at this time.”
She blamed Republicans for putting the Biden administration in this position. “It’s a shame that we have a Republican Party that is committed to keeping America’s working class in debt,” Byrne said.
In documents withdrawing student loan proposals, the Education Department insisted it had the authority to cancel the debt, but sought to focus on other priorities in the final weeks of administration. He said the administration would work to help borrowers resume payments after the coronavirus pandemic, when payments were suspended.
“The Department currently intends to commit its limited operational resources to assisting at-risk borrowers successfully return to repayment,” the agency wrote.
The withdrawals begin as Washington prepares for a possible government shutdown that could further complicate the Biden administration’s efforts to fix the problems.
Another proposed rule that could be withdrawn is a measure that would have blocked schools from imposing blanket bans on transgender athletes. Trump could revamp the pending Title IX amendment to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports, one of his campaign promises.
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An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the administration still supports the goals of its regulatory proposals. However, the process can be lengthy because it requires legal reviews and gathering public comments.
Federal agencies are currently analyzing which rules to complete and which to withdraw before the end of Biden’s term, the official said.
In recent years, presidents have tended to rely more on executive orders and federal regulations to avoid gridlock in Congress. However, the rulemaking process may be less durable than legislation, making policies more vulnerable to changes between administrations.
There are dozens of other regulations pending at the Department of Education and other agencies, ranging from relatively trivial updates to sweeping policies that have big implications for the nation’s schools and businesses.
If a rule has already gone through a public feedback process under Biden, Trump could simply replace it with his own proposal and move directly to enacting the policy, thereby bypassing the comment period.
The two student loan proposals expected to be withdrawn Friday represented Biden’s second attempt at widespread debt forgiveness after the Supreme Court rejected his first plan.
One of them is an April proposal that would have provided targeted debt relief for 30 million Americans. It defined several categories of borrowers eligible for relief. Borrowers who saw their balances balloon due to interest would have had their accrued interest wiped out. Those who had been repaying their loans for 20 years or more would have had their loans wiped out.
That proposal was halted by a federal judge in September after Republican-led states sued, and it remains mired in a legal battle.
The second withdrawn rule is an October proposal that would have allowed the Department of Education to forgive loans to people facing various types of hardship, including those struggling with high medical bills or child care costs. children.
Although Biden never got the massive loan forgiveness he initially promised, his administration canceled an unprecedented $180 billion in federal student loans through existing programs.
“Thanks to our actions, millions of people across the country now have the flexibility to start a business, save for retirement, and pursue life plans that they had to put on hold due to the burden of student debt “Biden said in a statement. .
On Friday, officials announced they were wiping out debt for another 55,000 workers, including teachers, nurses and law enforcement officials, through public service loan forgiveness. The program promises to forgive loans to borrowers who spend 10 years in government or nonprofit jobs.
The $4.28 billion in relief is expected to be the final round of public service loan forgiveness before Biden leaves office in January.
Biden’s rule on transgender sports was proposed in 2023 but has been repeatedly delayed. This was supposed to follow his broader rule that extended civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ students under Title IX.
The sports rule would have prohibited schools from banning transgender athletes outright while allowing limits for certain reasons — for example, if it was a matter of “fairness” in competition or to reduce risk of injury.
This issue remained on the back burner during the presidential campaign as the issue became a subject of Republican outrage. Trump campaigned on promising to ban transgender athletes, with a promise to “keep men out of women’s sports.”
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