FILE - President Joe Biden speaks at an event about canceling student debt, at the Madison Area Technical College Truax campus, April 8, 2024, in Madison, Wis. Federal judges in Kansas and Missouri on Monday, June 24, blocked parts of a Biden administration student loan repayment plan that provides a faster path to cancellation and lower monthly payments for millions of borrowers. The judges’ rulings prevent the U.S.
Ross issued a ruling in a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey on behalf of his state and six others. “Only Congress has the power of the purse, not the President,” Bailey said in a statement. "Today’s ruling was a huge win for the rule of law, and for every American who Joe Biden was about to force to pay off someone else’s debt.”
In a statement posted on the social media platform X, leaders of the Student Borrower Protection Center, which advocates for eliminating student debt, called the decisions “partisan lawfare” and “a recipe for chaos across the student loan system.” Both orders are preliminary, meaning the injunctions imposed by the judges would remain in effect through a trial of the separate lawsuits. However, to issue a temporary order each judge had to conclude that the states were likely to prevail in a trial.
That left Alaska, South Carolina and Texas, and Crabtree said they could sue because each has a state agency that services student loans.