is up to the parliamentarian and Congress, not Biden
“ The key provision that advocates of cancellation cite comes from the Higher Education Act, which was originally signed in 1965 and has been updated since.
Specifically, the law grants a presidential administration, via the Education Secretary, authority to "enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release" government-held federal student loans. Indeed, the Higher Education Act provided the authority for President Donald Trump and Biden to pause student loan debt payments during the coronavirus pandemic.
However, experts disagree on whether the president can authorize widespread debt cancellation through an executive order. There’s enough of a legal question that any move by the president would likely prompt litigation, experts said.
"There are instances of presidents' executive orders being thrown out in the courts because they take actions that were not authorized by laws in the past," said Jason MacDonald, a political scientist at West Virginia University.
The Trump administration saw this kind of judicial pushback with its initial travel ban for people from Muslim-majority countries, MacDonald said.
While modest efforts to roll back student debt might not prompt legal obstacles, "the more ambitiously this authority is used, the greater the possibility of a legal challenge," said Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University.
One of the contested issues could be Congress’ past changes to the Higher Education Act that cited narrow conditions under which student debt may be forgiven. Past federal legislation has addressed debt relief for teachers and workers in the public sector, cases in which schools close before a student earns a degree, and cases of a student’s death or disability. It’s not as clear whether blanket forgiveness would pass legal muster, experts said.
Similarly, the Higher Education Act’s authority to "compromise, waive, or release" has typically been used in the past for loans only in unusual circumstances, on a case-by-case basis, and for loans that are not expected to be repaid. Despite many recent graduates’ heavy debt loans, it’s not clear that all of their loans would be deemed unpayable.
"‘Compromise’ usually is used when someone cannot possibly pay a debt to the government, so the government cuts a deal," said Adam Looney, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "That’s very different from mass cancelation."
Meanwhile, a different law, the Federal Claims Collection Act, provides federal agencies with the authority to collect or compromise claims and suspend or terminate collection action.
However, this law "imposes a high standard for when the government can compromise a debt, to narrow circumstances like when the debtor is unable to pay and that inability is verified, or when the cost to collect the debt would be too high to justify the collection." Looney said.
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https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jun/14/can-student-loan-debt-be-canceled-presidents-execu/
As for the assessment that this would cause us to lose in 2024, that assumes this is the only issue people care about, it isn’t
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