We’re still in the early stages of legal challenges to President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel student debt for a wide swath of borrowers, but the threat of litigation is likely already limiting some borrowers’ ability to receive relief. The White House’s debt forgiveness plan faced its first major legal challenge Thursday, as six Republican-led states filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to block the debt relief plan. On the same day, the Department of Education changed the eligibility requirements for the one-time forgiveness, potentially cutting hundreds of thousands of borrowers out of the initiative, but possibly mitigating the plan’s exposure to litigation.
Biden announced in August that his Administration would cancel up to $10,000 in student debt for borrowers earning up to $125,000 and $20,000 in student loans for borrowers who used Pell grants to attend college. Almost immediately, opponents of the plan began strategizing legal challenges. The suit filed Thursday by Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina, argues that the Biden Administration doesn’t have the legal authority to cancel student debt and that the states will be harmed if officials are able to move forward with discharging the loans. It’s one of multiple filed in a week over the debt relief plan, including a separate suit filed by Arizona’s attorney general . “This is a much more credible lawsuit than anything we’ve seen so far,” Luke Herrine, an assistant professor of law at the University of Alabama, said of the suit filed by the coalition of six states. Nonetheless, “I still think they have all kinds of issu …