Florida, alongside five additional states, has filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan, arguing it oversteps executive authority and burdens taxpayers without congressional approval.
The State of Florida, in alliance with Missouri, Arkansas, Georgia, Ohio, and Oklahoma, has initiated legal proceedings against the Biden administration’s plan to forgive student loan debt.
Filed in the Eastern District of Missouri’s U.S. District Court, the lawsuit challenges what is alleged to be an overextension of executive power to enact the “SAVE Plan” to implement student loan forgiveness without Congressional consent.
The lawsuit targets President Joe Biden, Secretary of Education Miguel A. Cardona, and the United States Department of Education, contending that their approach of using “outdated statutes” to implement major policy changes. The plaintiff states argue that these policies, particularly the student loan forgiveness plan, could significantly burden taxpayers, with costs potentially reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.
The plaintiffs assert that the Biden Administration breached the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), particularly criticizing the policy’s formation as arbitrary and not aligned with required legal procedures. The suit further references the Supreme Court’s decision in “Biden v. Nebraska,” where a similar attempt to cancel student loan debt was deemed an overreach of executive power.
“This latest attempt to sidestep the Constitution 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,” the suit reads.
In a previous legal challenge, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against the Biden administration’s plan to forgive student loan debt, which was estimated to affect the federal budget by over $430 billion. The 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court found that the administration’s repayment plan exceeded its authority by implementing such a significant fiscal policy without clear authorization from Congress.
“Last year, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s illegal attempt to force Americans to pay off someone else’s debt,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said in a prepared statement. “Now, Biden thumbs his nose at the court like he has done with so many issues, including immigration, and does what he wants, trying again to mass-cancel student debt. We will fight in court to make sure that hard-working Americans, who are struggling to buy groceries thanks to Biden, are not on the hook for other people’s debt.”