On Sunday, President Joe Biden made an important declaration: He conceded, finally, the pandemic is finally over.
He acknowledged that COVID-19 remains to be and might be there forever entirely; we'll still be dealing with it, in certain form, for many years. But vaccines that drastically reduce the likelihood of severe symptoms and death are for sale to all those who want them. We've booster shots for individuals who desire extra protection, such as the elderly and immunocompromised, or anyone else. People who desire to be extra cautious can wear KN95 masks, which scientists believe filter out the vast majority of pathogenic particles. Cumulatively, these disease prevention measures make COVID-19 a far less pressing problem. Moreover, these measures can be implemented voluntarily.
But here is a question: When the pandemic is over, as Biden admits, then why is the us government still operating with the emergency powers granted into it throughout a national crisis?
According to Reuters, the public health emergency-which was declared by former President Mr . trump in early 2022-is still essentially, and the Biden administration fully intends to renew it come October. The present plan is for that Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to allow the emergency expire early next year in January 2023.
But if Biden says the pandemic has ended, then the emergency authority he's claimed for himself should already have come to an end.
This matters, because Biden has utilized his emergency authority in very significant ways-most recently, he tried on the extender to forgive countless billions of dollars in student loan debt. As Reason's Peter Suderman explained inside a recent piece, Biden's loan forgiveness plan was issued under the auspices of a national emergency law.
In 2003, Congress passed the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for college students, or HEROES Act. The act \”permits the Secretary of Education to waive or modify Federal student financial help program requirements to assist students and their families or educational institutions impacted by a war, other military operation, or national emergency.\”
The clear aim of the law ended up being to delay or modify education loan repayment plans for Americans who have been serving in combat operations-not for anybody who just became of have student loans in the center of the pandemic. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't think Biden had the authority to cancel student loan debt.
\”Not everybody realizes that, but the president can only postpone, delay although not forgive student loans,\” she said in June 2022. \”It would take an action of Congress, not an executive order, to cancel education loan debt.\”
A few weeks ago, President Biden went ahead and canceled student loan debt anyway. His plan allows borrowers under a certain income threshold to have as much as $20,000 forgiven. His plan also creates incentives for borrowers to maneuver toward Income-Driven Repayment, or IDR, meaning rather than pay back their loans, they'd repay a portion of their income for a decade. In most cases, this will be a much better deal for them than repaying the borrowed funds. I've previously warned that unless the government also forbids universities to raise prices, the likely results of this plan is going to be skyrocketing tuition rates because students may have more incentive to borrow heavily and the educational facilities will be wholly unconstrained in terms of what they are charging. Taxpayers are footing the balance, not the scholars.
In a recent report for the Brookings Institute, Senior Fellow Adam Looney discovered that the damage done by Biden's IDR program will essentially be catastrophic: \”There are several dimensions that will probably have significant, unanticipated, negative effects,\” he writes. These include increased rates of borrowing cheap \”low-quality, low-value, low-earning programs\” are essentially getting a subsidy. \”With relation to its overall college costs,\” writes Looney, \”institutions may have a motivation to produce valueless programs and aggressively recruit students into those programs with promises they will be free under an IDR plan.\”
This is very bad. And also to be clear, the legal justification was dubious to start with. But now the justification doesn't exist at all: Biden admits the nation's emergency has transpired.
And as National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke noted in a recent piece, the Biden administration has already conceded when it ever had such authority, that point is over. In May, the administration ceased using its Title 42 powers to expel immigrants based on COVID-19 fears. In the memo announcing the modification in policy, the Department of Justice wrote: \”The CDC has now determined, in the expert opinion, that continued reliance on this authority is no longer warranted in light of the present public-health circumstances.\”
If it was true in May, it's even truer now. The only real difference between the government government's emergency Title 42 power and its emergency education loan deferment powers is that Biden didn't really wish to keep while using former, but he does wish to keep using the latter. Bad for him. The end of the COVID-19 national emergency means it is now superior the president cannot unilaterally forgive vast amounts of dollars of student debt absent an act of Congress.
