The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it will be withdrawing both parts of its Plan C for student loan cancellation. One part involves various ways the department would have declared that a borrower has a “hardship” deserving of complete loan cancellation. The other part would have identified additional categories for waivers of loan repayments, such as when the borrower’s loan balance is larger than the original loan (which is, in fact, a normal situation for many borrowers who get their loan payments deferred for various reasons ). Both are being withdrawn via a scheduled notice in the Federal Register on Dec. 26.
Withdrawing the hardship rule was what my Heritage Foundation colleague Madison Marino and I advised in our regulatory comment on the proposed rule. We argued that the department should confess its pretextual rulemaking—conveniently…
