The Biden administration on Friday withdrew some of its main outstanding plans to enact significant federal student loan forgiveness and to set rules around the participation of transgender athletes on school sports teams.
The regulations were, at one time, among the administration’s top education policy priorities, and the decision to pull down the proposed regulations was a tacit acknowledgment that they would go nowhere under the administration of incoming President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Criticizing protections for transgender people was a central theme during Mr. Trump’s campaign, and he routinely attacked student debt reform.
But the move was also designed to insulate both policies against immediate manipulation by the incoming administration. The decision helped ensure that the open proposals could not be quickly rewritten, and that the Trump administration would have to at least start the process of introducing its own regulations from scratch.
With the student debt proposals in particular, it also helped avoid the possibility that a future lawsuit might invalidate the legal foundation underpinning them. A ruling against them could doom the policies for many years to come.
The proposed rule around transgender athletes was nuanced. It would have created some protections, prohibiting outright bans. But it also would have allowed schools to exclude some categories of students from playing sports on teams that matched their gender identities.
While the Biden administration had been hesitant to take a firm stance on the divisive question of transgender athletes, the proposal was meant to provide schools grappling with the question with some clarity.
Specifically, the proposed rule aimed to make “categorically” banning transgender athletes a violation of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, while encouraging schools to “minimize harms to students” whose participation might be limited or denied based on their gender identity.
The Education Department said that it had decided to withdraw the rule related to transgender athletes because of a variety of pending lawsuits on the issue.
The situation was “profoundly disappointing,” said Liz King, a senior director at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of civil rights groups that advocates for protections for transgender students.
Ms. King said she was “deeply irritated that this rule was not finalized a long time ago,” but added that the Biden administration’s move on Friday was “just a procedural move.”
“We don’t at all interpret this as a backing down from a commitment to equal opportunity in education and athletics,” she said.
While the Biden administration had specifically delayed finalizing the rule before the 2024 election to avoid political blowback, it took action to put in place other protections for transgender students, such as expanding Title IX in April to prohibit discrimination and harassment based on gender identity.
In a statement, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-leaning group that has brought lawsuits related to transgender athletes, called the retraction of the proposal a “step in the right direction.”
The Biden administration’s proposed regulations would have been in conflict with many state laws. Half of all states have banned transgender students from taking part in sports consistent with their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group that tracks state-level legislation.
Earlier in the day, the Biden administration also began the process of withdrawing two unfinished student loan regulations that aimed to cancel debt for as many as 38 million people.
The pending regulations amounted to a fallback approach after the Supreme Court ruled last year that the Biden administration had overstepped its authority with its plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in student debt.
The more expansive plan of the two, proposed in April, would have given the education secretary broad discretion to cancel student loan balances in cases where interest on borrowers’ loans had ballooned over time, or where borrowers had been paying regularly for more than 20 years without reaching an end. The administration had estimated that nearly 30 million people could have qualified for relief under the regulation.
The other proposal, put forward in October, would have extended forgiveness to borrowers with a demonstrated financial hardship that made paying off their student debt unfeasible.
In twin notices posted to the Federal Register, the Education Department said it was not withdrawing the rules “based upon a changed view of the secretary’s authority,” but had decided to focus instead on supporting borrowers still struggling to make payments after the pandemic.
“The department at this time intends to commit its limited operational resources to helping at-risk borrowers return to repayment successfully,” the notices said.
Since the rules were proposed, a number of legal experts have said the legal reasoning underpinning them was risky, especially after the Supreme Court’s decision in 2023. The ruling expressed deep skepticism about the powers the Higher Education Act of 1965 gives the education secretary to cancel loans.
While the administration has maintained its view that the law grants that authority, the question was never tested in court. And if the rules were challenged by Republican state attorneys general next year, as many other parts of President Biden’s student debt policy have been, the Trump administration appears disinclined to defend them, potentially leading to a judicial decision barring them from being tried again in the future.
A spokesman for the White House declined to directly address the reasoning behind the decision. The Education Department referred questions to the White House.
Groups representing student borrowers said they were dismayed and argued that Republicans had forced the administration to backtrack.
“We are deeply disappointed that the actions of right-wing attorneys general have blocked tens of millions of borrowers from accessing critical student debt relief,” Persis Yu, the deputy executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, said in a statement.
While Mr. Trump and his education secretary, Betsy Devos, rapidly undid policies set by former President Barack Obama upon taking office in 2016, some officials had held out hope that some of the most politically innocuous elements of Mr. Biden’s student debt policy would survive.
As it prepared to withdraw the regulations, the Biden administration focused on its success in other areas on Friday, announcing the approval of roughly 55,000 applications for loan forgiveness through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, totaling $4.28 billion. The approval brought the total number of people who have had their debt canceled under Mr. Biden to just shy of five million.
“Because of our actions, millions of people across the country now have the breathing room to start businesses, save for retirement and pursue life plans they had to put on hold because of the burden of student loan debt,” Mr. Biden said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
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