Did The Biden Administration Just Send A Big Signal On Student Loan Cancellation?

The Biden administration may have just given proponents of broad student loan forgiveness a reason to hold out hope that the President will take action on student debt.

The U.S. Department of Education announced this week that it would be hiring Toby Merrill as Deputy General Counsel. Merrill previously founded and directed the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a legal services organization that represents low-income borrowers who have been harmed by the predatory practices of for-profit schools. The Project has been involved in long-running litigation involving the Borrower Defense to Repayment program, which can provide student loan forgiveness to borrowers who were defrauded by their schools.

More notably, however, Merrill helped draft a key legal analysisarguing that the President has authority to cancel student loan debt through executive action. “Congress has granted the Secretary a more specific and unrestricted authority to create and to cancel or modify debt owed under federal student loan programs in the Higher Education Act (HEA) itself,” wrote Merrill in the memo, along with two other attorneys. “That provision empowers the Secretary to execute the broad debt cancellation plan [that Senator Elizabeth Warren] proposed.” Warren had put forth a proposal during her 2020 presidential campaign to cancel student loan debt on a mass scale.