Student Loan Regulations in Reverse and Seasonal Signs of American Democracy
30th December 2024
Are you aware that in our democracy the people least able to pay their debts are the ones who acquired expensive degrees to improve their earning potential? If you weren’t before, your ignorance has surely been remedied after no less than five rounds of Department of Education rulemaking aimed at relieving the distress of student-loan borrowers who found that—after years devoted to filing petty complaints over their professors’ verbal miscues—they were less upwardly mobile than they expected.
Under the Biden administration, the department worked with beaver-like diligence to appease this constituency, or at least its self-appointed representatives. Few priorities received more attention from the executive branch. Disinclined to the political exercise of negotiating with Congress, the Biden administrative preferred instead the esoteric, quasi-mystical exercises of combing statutes to uncover magical debt-nuking powers undiscovered by previous, less enterprising administrations. Whenever the fruits of their labors came under legal attack, as they often did, the Education Department deployed battalions of the executive branch’s lawyerly army to convince federal judges that the government had not taken leave of its senses.
Except that now, after all that trouble and effort, the Department of Education is withdrawing these regulations. Specifically, on Dec. 20, the department announced it was withdrawing the two most recent rules (one already enjoined by a federal court). Had student borrowers suddenly found their financial footing? Not exactly. The Associated Press reports that this is merely one part of “an administration-wide plan to jettison pending regulations to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from retooling them to achieve his own aims.” The department’s notice of withdrawal more or less confirms that cynical reading when it closes in an “oh, by the way” sort of tone, that the incoming administration would have to repeat the laborious negotiated rulemaking process to implement any new policy in this area.