The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Biden student debt cancellation plan came at a bad time for American households and the US economy more broadly.

President Joe Biden’s inability to pass a student debt cancellation plan through Congress was yet another instance of fledgling progressive economic policy being torpedoed by gridlock and corporate subservience. Turning instead to an injunction from the Department of Education, Biden’s plan would have slashed $430 billion in federal student loans for roughly forty-three million borrowers. This amounted to $10,000 a student (and $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants), which would have helped shrink the average federal student loan debt balance of $37,717.

The Supreme Court majority opinion argued that the “statutory permission to modify” (elucidated in the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act or HEROES legislation) does not authorize “basic and fundamental changes in the scheme,” which they argued debt cancellation would constitute. As a result, millions of students will now need to begin servicing their federal loan repayments, which were paused on account of the COVID-19 pandemic.