of Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, continues to hallucinate an executive power to cancel student loans at will. The president seems to think he’s still a legislator, but now with a self-sufficient majority of one. He reads statutes as invitations to supplement the law with politically expedient amendments.
For starters, the administration has not offered the public evidence of the scale of the supposed miscounting. Administrative incompetence should not be underestimated. The Higher Education Act already specifies the requirements for getting credit toward the needed number of years, for instance, making the full payment one of the various income-driven repayment plans or having your loan deferred due to a bona fide “economic hardship,” a status the Higher Education Act defines by employment and income level.
Last fall, the administration released several legal memoranda purporting to justify its debt-canceling plan. Now, by contrast, the administration has been mum on the legal justifications for its latest actions., it gave the following view on the legal limits imposed by the Higher Education Act’s criteria: “This section does notthe Secretary from using the regulatory authority to add additional periods.
Moreover, agencies such as the Department of Education have no inherent authority at all. Agencies are purely creatures of statute, wielding only those powers delegated to them by Congress. No agency enjoys a freewheeling power to amend laws via internal rule-making.