President Joe Biden speaks outside Independence Hall, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022, in Philadelphia.
(AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a lawsuit against Biden’s student debt relief.
It’s the third lawsuit filed against the impending relief, with one borrower decrying a new tax bill.
The state lawsuits argue that the relief will hurt revenues, and that Biden has said the pandemic is over.
Another lawsuit has entered the fray to try and halt President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness ahead of the program’s rollout.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a lawsuit on Thursday against President Biden, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, and the Department of Education, arguing that the cancellation will harm Arizona in myriad ways. Those include making it harder to recruit lawyers through public loan forgiveness programs, cutting potential tax revenues, and upping borrowing and law enforcement costs.
“This mass debt forgiveness program is fundamentally unfair, unconstitutional, and unwise,” Brnovich said in a statement. “The question Americans need to be asking is why college costs so much in the first place.”
The suit points to Biden’s comments that the pandemic has ended, even though the legal maneuver to provide relief hinges on the pandemic still being in force. It also cites the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that student loan relief will cost $400 billion over a 30-year projection, a figure that’s about half of what the administration will spend on defense this year alone. Under Biden’s plan, borrowers making under $125,000 will qualify for $10,000 in federal relief, with recipients of Pell Grants eligible for $20,000 in cancellation under the same income cap.
“Here, the presence of half a trillion dollars of student debt cancellation is a clear admission that the higher education industry needs structural reforms, but contains no reforms whatsoever such as requiring colleges to reduce costs, or be more transparent about the low job prospects of certain courses of study,” the filing says.
The “cancellation instead is a naked handout by one administration and one party to favored political classes (college graduates and those employed by the higher education industry) at the expense of taxpayers everywhere,” the suit continues.
Arizona’s lawsuit marks yet another major suit being brought against the impending relief, on which the Education Department has begun sending out guidance to borrowers.
A lawsuit hinging on the tax burden that automatic relief will cost one plaintiff was filed by a conservative law organization earlier this week, although the Biden administration seems to have sidestepped that legal challenge by clarifying that borrowers will have the option to opt out of relief. On Wednesday, a group of six GOP-led states filed their own lawsuit, saying that relief will impact their revenues and harm Missouri loan servicer MOHELA.
Student loan borrowers who are set to see their full debts relieved previously told Insider that the relief would be life-changing, and, in at least one case, allow them to keep their home. Around 20 million borrowers are expected to see all of their debt wiped, with over 40 million borrowers impacted in total by relief.