I tried Googling it, but it gave me irrelevant results.
Did any of the people at all who applied very first (during the beta rollout on that weekend) manage to get their applications processed and 10-20k of loans forgiven before the judges blocked Biden's program?
Q: Did any people manage to get their student loans forgiven via Biden program before courts blocked it?
No. While the earliest relief that could have been granted likely would have been in November 2022, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the program on October 21, 2022, a mere four days after the application site was launched.
Originally, the Education Department had said that borrowers would receive forgiveness within six weeks after they applied. The full application launched Oct. 17, ... [cnbc]
While researching this question, it occurred to me that using the HEROES Act to suspend debt payments and interest for everyone during the pandemic was probably unlawful. The text and sense of Congress of the act suggests that relief was intended only to be available to individuals, upon application. Thus, the Trump administration, by using the act for relief during the pandemic, may have opened the door for the Biden administration to use the act for loan forgiveness. Then I found this comment in a CRS Report: Statutory Basis for Biden Administration Student Loan Forgiveness, September 13, 2022.
Other commentators argue that the purpose for which Congress enacted the HEROES Act makes its use in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic “problematic.” Congress enacted a precursor to the HEROES Act three months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. When the HEROES Act itself was first enacted, many of the remarks in the House of Representatives about the bill focused on providing relief to those deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and other military commitments. (The Senate passed the HEROES Act by unanimous consent and without floor debate.) The contention of these commentators is that the COVID-19 pandemic differs too greatly from the types of exigencies that they claim motivated adoption of the HEROES Act.
Congress could have passed separate legislation, to suspend student loan interest and repayment, specific to the pandemic without extending the HEROES Act beyond its intent.
I also searched the Federal Register for notices or rules regarding the student loan forgiveness plan. Normally, such rules are published with a comment period before any change takes effect. I found one item relevant to my search: Agency Information Collection Activities; Comment Request; Federal Student Loan Debt Relief Application and Verification Forms Request (concerning the content of forms), for which public comment will not be complete until December 16, 2022. But other searches show why I was unable to find the rule. In How Do You Challenge A Student Loan Forgiveness Rule That Does Not Exist?, September 30, 2022.
There has been no notice in the Federal Register. Rather, we are left with a series of press releases, fact sheets, and the like. Government by blog post, as I've called it, is not new. The Obama Administration would often modify regulatory regimes, such as the Affordable Care Act, through FAQs and other subregulatory guidance documents. But as best as I can recall, the Obama Administration did not deliberately avoid publishing a new rule to frustrate legal challenges. Yet it seems that the Biden Administration is doing exactly that. Indeed, the Administration appears to be making changes to the policy on the fly for the express purpose of blocking law suits.
We should all think back to the census litigation. The Chief Justice, in particular, was incensed with how the Trump Administration played fast and loose with the rules, and modified explanations on the fly during the course of litigation. Here, we have an inchoate policy that is about to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, without an actual rule in print.
