President Joe Biden said he would move forward on forgiving billions of dollars in student loans even though the Supreme Court struck down a previous effort to do so.

From day one, I promised to fix broken student loan programs and make sure higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity.

I’m not backing down.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 24, 2024

"From day one, I promised to fix broken student loan programs and make sure higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity," Biden wrote on X.

"I'm not backing down" despite the $34.5 trillion in debt the country already has, he added.

"Buying votes"

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R) said the plan amounted to "buying votes" and that Biden was "incredibly hypocritical."

"I just hope everybody in America realizes that we're still spending more money than what we bring in in this country," she went on. "So when he does stuff like this, he's literally borrowing this money from China and then giving it to people so that they will support him and put him back in the White House, so he can continue his reign of control."

"So, it's really the worst of the worst and Americans are waking up to it with all these crises we have going on at the border, our national security, people's gas and groceries being unaffordable," Noem continued.

His plan

Biden announced the SAVE plan in February and said the Supreme Court wouldn't stop him from canceling the debts this time.

If borrowers have been in repayment for 10 years or more and hold less than $12,000 in student debt, they are eligible for the program.

Biden said 153,000 borrowers qualify for the plan.

"Early in my term, I announced a major plan to provide millions of working families with debt relief for their college student debt," Biden said at the Julian Dixon Library in Culver City, California. "Tens of millions of people in debt were literally about to be canceled in debts. But my MAGA Republican friends in the Congress, elected officials and special interests stepped in and sued us. And the Supreme Court blocked it. But that didn’t stop me."

Previous attempts

In June 2023, the Supreme Court said it was not permissible for Biden's Secretary of Education to use $430 billion in taxpayer money to forgive student debt.

It wasn't clear what was different about the new plan that Biden would be so confident about the court leaving it alone.

Critics of student debt forgiveness point out that some taxpayers who didn't go to college would be in effect paying off the student loans of those who did, which is blatantly unfair.