Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan was put on hold following a ruling by a federal judge in Texas recently. Because of the way this entire fiasco had been rolled out, more than 25 million Americans had already signed up for the program, anticipating the removal of their debt and not having to make any more payments. But as of Thursday, the site where people were signing up isn’t taking any new applications. The White House is appealing the ruling and may still prevail, but for the time being, those who were able to sign up don’t know if they will still have to make their next payments. Those who didn’t get in on the action in time don’t know if they may have missed the boat entirely. (CBS News)

The Biden Administration’s plan to provide up to $20,000 in loan relief for student borrowers is now halted after a federal judge in Texas blocked the program and declared it “unlawful,” raising questions and financial uncertainty for the roughly 40 million Americans who qualify for debt forgiveness.

Already, 26 million people have applied to the program since the application went live in October. But after the ruling on Thursday, the Biden administration stopped taking applications for its student debt forgiveness program.

While the administration plans to appeal, the ruling prompts questions about what may happen next as legal challenges unfold, and as borrowers face a financial deadline with the student debt repayment hiatus slated to expire in December and repayments set to restart in January.

One thing that seems clear is that the country was sold a bill of goods in terms of how much debt might be eliminated. Of course, the debt isn’t really “eliminated.” It will simply be passed on to the taxpayers, many of whom are paying mortgages and other types of loans that nobody has offered to “forgive” for them.

We also were grossly misled about what all of this is going to cost. As the Washington Examiner reported this weekend, one government estimate suggests the price tag will be 400 billion dollars. Another study puts the figure at closer to a trillion.

While House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized Pittman’s decision in a statement Thursday, saying that the lawsuits against the president’s debt relief program have been “backed by extreme Republican special interests.”

The plan to cancel outstanding student debt will cost the country roughly $400 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, while another budget model pegged the cost at nearly $1 trillion.

In case any of you haven’t been keeping score, we’re currently battling a hefty inflation rate and soaring prices because we’ve already set seven trillion dollars of imaginary money on fire over the past 20 months. The total national debt is currently at a level that is too terror-inducing for M. Night Shyamalan to even make a movie about it. And now we’re going to dump yet another full trillion or half a trillion on top of it? To copy a question recently posed by an economist commenting on the current inflation rates, ‘what did you think was going to happen?’

On top of all that, the courts who are putting the brakes on this scheme are raising very valid questions about whether or not this is even legal. The judge who ordered the most recent halt in the program described it as “either one of the largest delegations of legislative power to the executive branch or one of the largest exercises of legislative power without congressional authority in the history of the United States.”

But why listen to judges or economists when you can simply take the word of Elizabeth Warren? She recently settled the issue, declaring that the entire plan is perfectly legal and fully within Biden’s authority. On what grounds? She didn’t say. But keep in mind that even Nancy Pelosi said at one point that the President didn’t have the authority to do this. And that was just last year. I’m not sure what groundbreaking ruling took place between then and now to change that conclusion. Most likely, the only thing that changed was the narrative.