FORT WORTH, Texas — The number of legal challenges to President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel millions of dollars of student debt continues to mount. The latest, a lawsuit by the Job Creators Network Foundation, was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Fort Worth.
Elaine Parker, the president of the foundation, called the president’s plan, which was announced in August, an “unprecedented executive power grab.”
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, who notably ruled that the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional in 2018, will hear the case.
The application to apply for student loan relief is set to be available sometime in early October, potentially assisting over 3 million Texans.
The student loan relief plan was announced by Biden on Aug. 24 and will cancel up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for non-Pell Grant recipients.
Two Texas-area graduates named in the suit argue they should be receiving forgiveness, or more forgiveness than currently allowed under the debt-relief program, and that they were deprived of the ability to share these concerns since no comments were gathered before the program was announced.
Lawsuits have been filed by other conservative groups as well as a coalition of six Republican-led states arguing that the program will hurt state tax revenues, according to Business Insider. Two have been dismissed by judges.
Two graduates of Texas colleges are named in the lawsuit, both arguing that they should receive forgiveness, or more forgiveness than under the current rule.
Myra Brown, a 1993 graduate of UT El Paso who also attended SMU, currently has more than $17,000 in private loan debt — ineligible for forgiveness under the Biden program.
“If the Department is going to provide debt forgiveness, Ms. Brown believes that her student loan debt should be forgiven too,” the initial complaint said. “She believes it is irrational, arbitrary, and unfair to exclude her from the Program because her student loan debt is commercially held and not in default.”
Under the program, students who had the needs-based Pell Grant are eligible for twice as much debt-forgiveness.
Alexander Taylor, the other plaintiff in the suit, attended the University of Dallas and has debt totaling more than $35,000.
The suit argues that he should receive the full amount of forgiveness, even if he didn’t have a Pell grant, arguing that “he should not be penalized because he did not receive a Pell Grant in college.”
“Mr. Taylor makes less than $25,000 a year, but he is ineligible for the full $20,000 in debt forgiveness,” attorneys say in the suit.
White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan responded to the suit with a statement shared with PBS defending the loan forgiveness program.
“While opponents of our plan are siding with special interests and trying every which way to keep millions of middle-class Americans in debt, the President and his Administration are fighting to lawfully give middle-class families some breathing room as they recover from the pandemic and prepare to resume loan payments in January,” he said in a statement.
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