Supreme Court decision will impact over 900,000 Indiana borrowers with student loan debt

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, impacting over 900,000 Indiana residents. Borrowers now have roughly 60 days before they need to restart their student loan payments.

Nationally, up to $20,000 in federal student loans per person could have been forgiven under the program.

According to the Education Data Initiative, a research team that collects data on the U.S. education system, Indiana borrowers have roughly $30 billion in federal student loans. The average borrower in Indiana holds over $30,000 in student loan debt.

Sean FitzGerald is an Indianapolis resident whose household has roughly $35,000 in student loan debt. He said Biden’s loan forgiveness would have almost completely wiped his own loan debt clean. He said he is “stewing in disappointment”.

“Disappointed but unfortunately not unexpected is kind of how I feel today,” he said. “You’ll vent and take today, and then tomorrow I’ll probably make some calls to my representatives.”

FitzGerald said the Supreme Court’s decision is going to have an impact on his family.

“I have a young child and frankly about to send him off to daycare - I’m going to have to reshuffle [my] budget quite a bit to ensure we’re able to do that,” he said. “We’re going to have to put off a car purchase. These are real, substantial things that were kind of budgeted and considered through, hoping [loan forgiveness] would go through.”

FitzGerald also said he’s hopeful the Biden administration continues to fight for some kind of relief for borrowers, given that student loan relief was part of Biden’s election campaign.

The Biden administration is expected to announce additional protections for student loan borrowers in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, according to NPR. In his decision for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the Biden Administration would need direct approval from Congress for such a sweeping loan forgiveness program.

“All this leads us to conclude that ‘[t]he basic and consequential tradeoffs’ inherent in a mass debt cancellation program ‘are ones that Congress would likely have intended for itself.’” Roberts wrote. “In such circumstances, we have required the Secretary to ‘point to clear congressional authorization’ to justify the challenged program.”

Writing for the dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said that the court had overstepped its bounds with the decision - substituting “itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness.”

“This Court today decides that some 40 million Americans will not receive the benefits the plan provides, because (so says the Court) that assistance is too “significan[t],” she wrote.

There have been suggestions that the relief program could have either boosted the economy or caused an increase in inflation - but one Purdue economist has said economic impacts of the plan, either way, were likely to be muted.

Biden’s loan forgiveness program would cost roughly as much as the U.S. has spent on temporary assistance for needy families, or TANF, in the last 20 years. 

Contact WBAA/WFYI reporter Benjamin Thorp at bthorp@wfyi.org. Follow on Twitter: @sad_radio_lad.

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