Biden administration withdraws education rules on student loan relief, trans athletes

The Biden administration withdrew two controversial education regulations Friday, backing off on a proposal to cancel student debt for 25 million Americans and a separate effort outlining the rights of transgender student-athletes.

Both proposals had been sharply criticized by President-elect Donald Trump, and Friday’s actions are an acknowledgment that Democrats have lost - or were about to lose - on both issues.

The student debt decision is an acknowledgment that the Trump administration was going to kill the proposal if President Joe Biden didn’t do so on his own. In the case of the sports rule, the move prevents the incoming administration from piggybacking on the Biden administration’s work and then rewriting the proposal altogether on a fast track.

Trump has vowed to fight “transgender insanity” in schools and to prevent transgender girls and women playing on girls’ and women’s athletic teams, or, as he put it, “keep men out of women’s sports.”

Separately, Trump has called the debt-relief effort “vile.” And while Biden has provided nearly $180 billion in relief to 4.9 million Americans to date, his attempts to do more have been thwarted by Republican lawsuits.

A spokesperson for the White House said agencies are deciding which rules to finalize and which to withdraw before the inauguration on Jan. 20.

The withdrawal of the student debt proposal comes on the same day Biden announced $4 billion in debt relief for nearly 55,000 public servants.

The proposed rule, dubbed “Plan B” and published in April, was designed to reach borrowers who the department said have been shut out of existing loan-forgiveness programs or have been trapped in unaffordable debt. Created through a negotiated rulemaking process, it was slated to be finalized this fall but has been stymied by a temporary injunction imposed in federal court in October. A group of Republican-led states successfully fought to prevent the Biden administration from enacting the regulation.

Although the case is ongoing, the department on Friday took a major step to end it.

In a Federal Register filing Friday, the Education Department said it decided to withdraw Plan B because of “the operational challenges” in implementing the package of rules.

“With the time remaining in this administration, the Department is focused on several priorities including court-ordered settlements and helping borrowers manage the final elements of the return to repayment,” the department wrote.

The issue of trans students and sports has been politically difficult for the Biden administration from the start. Polling shows that a clear majority of Americans oppose allowing transgender athletes to compete on girls’ and women’s teams. Twenty-six states ban their participation.

The Biden administration’s proposed regulation, published in April 2023, would have outlawed blanket state bans but given schools a road map for how they could bar transgender athletes in certain circumstances, particularly in competitive sports.

Still, seeing political risk, the Biden administration opted not to finalize the regulation before the November election.

If the agency finalizes the rule now, it would be subject to the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to debate and potentially cancel recently issued regulations. That would shine a spotlight on a tough issue for Democrats, people in both parties say, and force some Democrats to take politically difficult votes.

But if the agency did nothing, that would allow the incoming Trump administration to revise the proposed rule and ban trans girls and women from competing on girls’ and women’s teams altogether. And because the Biden rule had already gone through much of the cumbersome rulemaking process, a Trump version could have been implemented quickly and with few bureaucratic hurdles, even if it said something very different from what was originally proposed.

“The Trump administration could have simply looked at all the comments again and wrote the rule they wanted to write,” said Max Eden, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

In its explanation for withdrawing the rule, the agency noted that a companion regulation on Title IX was already subject to multiple lawsuits challenging the Biden administration’s view that discrimination on the basis of sex includes discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

The Friday notice also made clear that a new administration would have to start again with a new rulemaking process, which could take months or even years.

“We do not intend for a final rule to be issued,” it said. “If, in the future, we decide it is appropriate to issue regulations on this topic, we will do so via a new notice of proposed rulemaking, subject to the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.”

The department began working on the debt-relief rule after the Supreme Court shut down Biden’s attempt to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans for more than 40 million borrowers. The alternative program, Plan B, was far more targeted and relied on a different authority than its failed predecessor.

Plan B offers partial or full debt relief to borrowers in four circumstances: those who owe far more than they originally borrowed because of interest; those who have been paying for at least 20 or 25 years; those who attended career-training programs that led to high debt loads or low earnings; and those who are eligible for existing forgiveness programs but never applied.

A key feature of the plan was the elimination of up to $20,000 in accrued interest for borrowers, regardless of their income. Single borrowers earning less than $120,000 or married couples earning less than $240,000 could qualify to have all of their accrued interest forgiven if they are enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan.

The White House had estimated that more than 25 million people could benefit from that component alone. The Biden administration said the plan would cost $147 billion over a decade.

Republicans have been vehemently against the proposed rule and accused Biden of trying to skirt the Supreme Court’s ruling. Conservatives say Biden’s debt-relief policies are patently unfair to American taxpayers who never went to college or who already paid off their education loans.

“The Biden-Harris administration’s student loan schemes were always a lie,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), the ranking Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “With today’s latest withdrawal, they are admitting these schemes were nothing more than a dishonest attempt to buy votes by transferring debt onto taxpayers who never went to college or worked to pay off their loans.”

A White House spokesperson said the administration still supports the goals of the debt relief regulation but did not reply to a question about whether the administration still supports the goals of the sports rules.