Federal Appeals Court Temporarily Halts Biden’s Student Loan Relief

President Joe Biden speaks about student debt relief at Delaware State University in Dover, Del., on Oct. 21, 2022. Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images

A federal appeals court on Friday temporarily blocked President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel billions of dollars in federal student loans.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency petition from six Republican-led states who asked for a pause on the student debt relief while the court rules on their request for a longer-term injunction.

The St. Louis-based appeals court also ordered an expedited briefing schedule on the matter.

The lawsuit by the six Republican-led states—Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina—is before the appeals court after a lower court judge rejected the suit a day prior.

The states had argued that the debt relief program bypassed Congress and posed a threat to the states’ future tax revenues, as well as money earned by state entities that invest in or service the student loans. But U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey in St. Louis determined that while the six states had raised “important and significant challenges to the debt relief plan,” their lawsuit lacked the necessary legal standing to pursue the case.

Autrey’s decision had come about an hour after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied without explanation an emergency request to put the debt relief plan on hold in a separate challenge brought by the Wisconsin-based Brown County Taxpayers Association.

Biden’s student debt relief program, announced in August, seeks to cancel up to $10,000 to borrowers who earn less than $125,000 per year (or $250,000 as a couple per year), or $20,000 in debt relief to Pell Grant recipients who meet similar income standards.

Applications opened on Oct. 14. Nearly 22 million borrowers had applied for the debt relief program since, Biden said earlier Friday. This constitutes about half of the more than 40 million Americans that the Department of Education expects are eligible for some amount of debt relief.

Reuters contributed to this report.