The Biden administration’s first attempt at administering student debt relief was blocked by the US Supreme Court in 2023. Last month, two separate federal judges halted parts of Joe Biden’s SAVE plan — a new repayment plan that would lower payments to $0 a month for millions of debtors while also pausing their interest. When Biden releases the official proposed rules of his plan B of debt cancellation, they too will inevitably face legal challenges — and likely defeats.

Each of Biden’s efforts to relieve working families of the burden of crushing student debt have much in common. They’re all piecemeal, inadequate, means-tested, and slow to be administered. But worse, they’re destined to succumb to the same frivolous yet ultimately successful Republican court challenges leveraging a single student loan servicer as the deadly needle that threads a successful lawsuit against relief: MOHELA.

While the federal government owns the vast majority of student debt, they don’t actually service the debt. You cannot call the government to pay, negotiate, or inquire about your student debt in the way you can call the IRS about your taxes. Instead, the government pays hundreds of millions of dollars to private corporations to service student loans for it — and the corporations do a terrible job.