News Clips

“We applaud President Biden for extending this pause on student loan payments now and for affirming his intent to cancel student debt in the months ahead,” Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, said in a statement.

Student Borrower Protection Center executive director Mike Pierce stressed that “the letter of the law is clear: Canceling student debt was legal when Joe Biden announced his historic debt relief plan in August and remains so today.”

“As this country works its way out of the COVID-19 pandemic, working and middle-class Americans are counting on the President to deliver on his promise of student debt relief,” Persis Yu, the deputy executive director and managing counsel at the advocacy group Student Borrower Protection Center, which filed one of the briefs, said in a statement. “The collective Amici are on the front lines helping borrowers survive financial havoc wrought by the double…

“The administration has done a good job of laying out its reasoning for using the HEROES Act to implement the president’s $10,000/$20,000 debt relief plan and its authority for doing so as well,” said Persis Yu, deputy executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center. “The law is on the administration’s side.”

The letters are helping “folks understand a bit better why they haven’t had their debts forgiven yet,” noted Mike Pierce, executive director of the advocacy group Student Borrower Protection Center. “That doesn’t completely do away with the very real economic anxiety that people with student loans feel at this moment.”

On Monday, 225 organizations led by the Student Borrower Protection Center sent a letter to Biden calling on him to extend the pause on student-loan payments beyond its current expiration date of December 31. Two conservative lawsuits have blocked indefinitely the president’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans for federal borrowers.

“Servicers need to do a better job at articulating the world as it is to borrowers,” Student Borrower Protection Center’s (SBPC) Executive Director and Managing Counsel Persis Yu told The Hill. “One of the things we’ve seen historically is that with these announcements, instead of saying something as simple as ‘we don’t know yet, we’re getting details,’ servicers will just routinely give bad information.”

Reaction to the ruling was predictably mixed along political fault lines. The Student Borrower Protection Center blasted Pittman as a “right-wing federal judge,” saying “tens of millions of student loan borrowers across the country now have their vital debt relief blocked as a result of this farcical and fabricated legal claim.”