Litigation Update: Challenges to the SAVE Plan

Since its earliest days, the Biden Administration has been clear as to its goal of addressing what it sees as a crisis of student debt by forgiving notable segments of existing student loans. To that end, it has pursued several plans -- the attempted forgiveness of loans under the HEROES Act struck down in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), the SAVE Plan which is currently being litigated, and further yet-to-be-finalized actions from the Department of Education.

The SAVE Plan, more officially titled "Improving Income Driven Repayment for the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program and the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program.” (88 Fed. Reg. 43,820), seeks to amend the existing Higher Education Act REPAYE Program. It does so in three ways: lowering the cap for repayment relative to a borrower's discretionary income, redefining "discretionary" income, and canceling the loans of borrowers with a principal of $12000 or lower after 10 years of payments, adding a year for every $1000 borrowers had as a principal above that line. The Department of Education estimates these challenges would cost $137.9 billion over the next ten years, with others estimating the cost would be closer to half a trillion dollars.

Much like the HEROES Plan before it, the SAVE Plan has been subject to several challenges that are currently being litigated. Join us for a litigation update where Abhishek Kambli and moderator Sheng Li will summed up the statuses of the ongoing challenges and discussed where they may be going next.

Featuring:

Abhishek Kambli, Deputy Attorney General - Special Litigation and Constitutional Issues, Office of the Kansas Attorney General
(Moderator) Sheng Li, Litigation Counsel, New Civil Liberties Alliance
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