Many federal student loaওn borrowers have abandoned hope that President Joe Biden will follow through on his 2020 campaign promise of widespread loan forgiveness, but the administration is still forging ahead. 

The Department of Education is moving forward with a rulemaking process that will propose an alternative path in the wake of the Supreme Court's defeat of Biden’s pla🙈n to provide up to $20,000 of forgiveness per borrower making under $125,000 a year. On Friday, the department named the members of a committee that will help draft the plan, and outlined which borrowers the plan will be intended to help.

The latest step toward broader loan forgiveness comes as borrowers brac🦩e for the resumption of required payments after a three-and-half-year pause.

It’s yet to be decided who will receive forgiveness under the new plan, and how much. A committee of volunteer student loan borrowers, government officials, educators, and others, handpicked by the Biden administration, is scheduled to meet in October, November, and December to help draft the plan, which will be released at some point next year, the department said.

The new forgiveness effort will be aimed at addressing the problems of borrowers in several different situations, according to a statement from the department:

• Borrowers whose balances have grown due to unpaid interest
• People who are eligible for forgiveness under income-driven repayment plans but haven’t signed up for one
• People who took out debt to study at what turned out to be worthless programs
• Borrowers who entered repayment before recent programs benefiting borrowers became available
• Borrowers who struggle to repay their loans because of financial hardship
  

The rulemaking process will focus on those specific groups, as opposed to Biden’s original proposal which would have benefitted some 40 million people—the vast majority of borrowers. However, the department said the plan was aimed at helping "as many borrowers as possible," and an administration official said the effort wouldn’t necessarily end up targeting a narrower group.

“I don't think that it's fair to read it as narrowing the conversation,” James Kvaal, undersecretary of education, said in response to a question by a reporter on a conference call Friday.

Officials didn’t offer a specific timeline, nor did they say how the process might be delayed by an impending government shutdown this weekend. The rule will likely be announced shortly before the 2024 presidential election in November, Kathaꦯrine Meyer, a research fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution think tank estimated in a July commentary. 

Once the rule is announced, it is likely to face legal challenges. Out of more than 26,000 public comments submitted to a government website on the negotiated rulemaking process in July, some objected. Many in opposition said widespread forgiveness was unfair to people who already paid their debts or to those who never went to college in the first place, since taxpayers would ultimately foot the bill for the forgiven debt.

“These students knew or should have known the rules for agreeing to take on the debt,” one commenter wrote. “It’s not my fault [they] borrowed more than they should have.”

Those objections echoed arguments made by forgiveness opponents, led by a coalition of six states, which 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:successfully argued to the Supreme Court that the Biden administration did not have the constitutional authority to cancel student loan debt without the approval of Congress. Biden justified his previous attempt at forgiveness through a 2003 law called the HEROES Act, while this new attempt cites the 1965 Higher Education Act.

Legal experts are divided about whether Biden’s latest effort will have better luck in the likely event it reaches the Supreme Court, which is dominated by conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents.

John Patrick Hunt, a law professor at the University of California Davis, argued in an August paper that the Higher Education Act is “unusually clear” in authorizing the Secretary of Education to forgive debts.

In a 2022 paper, Colin Mark, currently a law clerk at a federal district court, concluded “Administrative forgiveness of student loan debt may be legal, but it faces myriad legal obstacles, any one of which might derail the program.”