The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear challenges to the Biden administration’s student debt relief program, all but putting the $400 billion plan on ice after a number of lower courts rejected requests to resuscitate it in recent weeks. The nation’s highest court said it will hear oral arguments in the case in February, and is expected to reach a decision by June. A series of successive legal challenges has stymied the administration’s efforts to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt apiece for millions of Americans, with the first coming from Judge Mark T. Pittman, a Trump appointee in Texas, who vacated the program in a Nov. 10 order that characterized it as a “complete usurpation” of congressional authority by the executive branch. Days later, a federal appeals court in St. Louis placed a nationwide injunction on the program while it considered a lawsuit by six states challenging it. The administration has asked that the Supreme Court lift the injunction but the application was “deferred pending oral argument” next year, according to the court’s Thursday order.
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