Biden signs debt ceiling bill; student loan pause to end in August

President Joe Biden has signed House Resolution 3746, the deal to raise America’s debt ceiling. With Biden’s signature, the student loan pause he championed now has an end date: 60 days after June 30. That falls on Aug. 29.

Biden had vowed to veto a standalone bill that terminated the student loan pause, House Joint Resolution 45. The pause has cost taxpayers some $5 billion per month. The House Education Committee found that 87% of Americans never took out student loans.

All told, the pause cost taxpayers $1 trillion, according to the committee’s majority report.

But the debt ceiling bill was not a veto candidate. There was a bipartisan consensus that America needed to meet its debt obligations. Among the 13 House members and two senators Michigan sends to Washington, D.C., only Rashida Tlaib, D-Dearborn, opposed the bill.

“The stakes could not have been higher,” Biden said on signing the bill. “No one got everything they wanted, but the American people got what they needed. We averted an economic crisis and an economic collapse.”

The Mackinac Center has sued the Biden Department of Education over the student loan pause.