What do broad student-loan forgiveness and tariffs have in common? More than you might think, according to the nation’s highest court.
On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, ruling that he lacked the authority to enact his expansive tariff policies under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. While IEEPA allows the president to regulate economic activity during emergencies, the Supreme Court said that Trump’s tariffs went beyond the law’s threshold.
If that argument sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same one the Supreme Court made in 2023 when it struck down former President Joe Biden’s broad student-loan forgiveness plan.
As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his concurring opinion on Friday, the court requires “clear congressional authorization” to carry out broad economic policies like student-loan forgiveness or tariffs.
Chief Justice John Roberts echoed that in his tariff opinion, writing that in Biden v. Nebraska, the student-debt ruling, the court “declined to read authorization to ‘waive or modify’ statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs as a delegation of power to cancel $430 billion in student loan debt.”
Roberts referred to the major questions doctrine, which requires federal agencies to have clear, congressional authorization — not ambiguous legal language — before enacting broad economic policies. He said that while Trump’s administration said that the doctrine should not apply in the tariff case, that “argument is nearly identical to one it already advanced” in the student-debt case.
“There, the Government contended that a different emergency statute should be interpreted broadly because its ‘whole point’ was to provide ‘substantial discretion to . . . respond to unforeseen emergencies,'” Roberts wrote. “We rejected that argument in Nebraska, and we reject it here as well.”
Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan would have canceled up to $20,000 in debt for federal borrowers. Biden’s administration was using the HEROES Act of 2003 to attempt to enact the relief, which gave the education secretary the ability to waive or modify student-loan balances in connection with a national emergency, like the pandemic. Just as it did in the tariff decision, the Supreme Court ruled at the time that the relief went beyond the law.
Trump has not yet commented on the Supreme Court’s ruling, and it does not affect the tariffs the president has imposed under laws other than IEEPA.
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