Social Security

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.”

The Student Borrower Protection Center’s Michael Pierce, a deputy assistant director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Obama, called on the Biden administration to “make it clear that the student loan system will remain shut off as long as these partisan legal challenges persist.” That would be one to do it, for sure. “Hey guys, as long as you’re suing to block us from canceling some debt for some borrowers, no one…

Michael Pierce who served as a deputy assistant director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Obama administration and is now at the Student Borrower Protection Center, has called for the administration to “make it clear that the student loan system will remain shut off as long as these partisan legal challenges persist.” Pierce has said Biden should explore other legal avenues to cancel student debt should the courts dismiss the one…

And as Student Borrower Protection Center deputy executive director and managing counsel Persis Yu pointed out to Teen Vogue in her October interview, the plaintiffs seem to be using the plan’s restrictions to make a counterintuitive argument. If the original suit claims that part of the plaintiffs’ “harm” is that the plan restricted or entirely eliminated their chance for debt relief, shouldn’t the logical fix be full debt relief for everyone?  “There’s something really illogical…

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.”