Education Department suspends application for student debt relief after court ruling

The Biden administration has stopped accepting new applications for its student debt relief program after a federal judge on Thursday evening struck down the policy as illegal.

The Education Department on Friday pulled the application for student debt relief from its StudentAid.gov website.

“Courts have issued orders blocking our student debt relief program,” the department said in a statement. “As a result, at this time, we are not accepting applications. We are seeking to overturn those orders. If you've already applied, we'll hold your application.”

The Education Department had already approved some 16 million borrowers for debt relief under the program, as of this week.

The department said that about 26 million borrowers in total had filled out an application for the program or been identified as automatically eligible based on income data already on file with the agency.

The status of those application is now uncertain after U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee in the Northern District of Texas, declared Biden’s debt relief program “an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power.” His ruling on Thursday struck down the program, going further than a previous federal appeals court order that had ordered the Education Department to halt the processing of loan discharges.

The Biden administration has appealed Judge Pittman’s ruling to the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals.