The Biden administration had argued that the 2003 HEROES Act gives the education secretary authority to deliver student loan debt relief. That law allows student loan debt relief when there is a national emergency to ensure people are not in a financially worse condition as a result of the national emergency.

The court majority, however, disagreed, siding with a group of states that sought to block the law in the case of Biden vs. Nebraska.

“The Secretary asserts that the HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal. It does not. We hold today that the Act allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

The court said the education secretary’s authority to “modify” statutes and regulations allows modest adjustments and additions to existing provisions, not the power to transform them.

“The Secretary’s comprehensive debt cancellation plan cannot fairly be called a waiver — it not only nullifies existing provisions, but augments and expands them dramatically. It cannot be mere modification, because it constitutes ‘effectively the introduction of a whole new regime,'” Roberts wrote.

The court said the congressional power of the purse means a massive debt cancellation like Biden wanted to implement is a power “that Congress would likely have intended for itself.”

Along with Nebraska, and five other states including Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina sought to have the court cancel Biden’s student debt relief program.

Roberts specifically cited Missouri’s claims in the decision to block the plan.

“Today, we have concluded that an instrumentality created by Missouri, governed by Missouri and answerable to Missouri is indeed part of Missouri; that the words ‘waive or modify’ do not mean ‘completely rewrite’; and that our precedent — old and new — requires Congress to speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy,” he wrote.

Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor.

Kagan said the HEROES Act clearly gives the education secretary the right to relieve student debt.

“The HEROES Act was designed to deal with national emergencies-typically major in scope, often unpredictable in nature. It gave the Secretary discretionary authority to relieve borrowers of the adverse impacts of many possible crises-as ‘necessary’ to ensure that those individuals are not ‘in a worse position financially’ to make repayment,” she wrote.

Kagan said the majority in this case “will not accept the statute’s meaning.”

“Wielding its judicially manufactured heightened-specificity requirement, the Court refuses to acknowledge the plain words of the HEROES Act. It declines to respect Congress’s decision to give broad emergency powers to the Secretary. It strikes down his lawful use of that authority to provide student-loan assistance,” Kagan’s dissent said.

In Board of Education vs. Brown, individual student loan borrowers Myra Brown and Alexander Taylor argued the education secretary improperly promulgated the debt-relief plan without required notice and comment rulemaking. And since both of them used commercial lenders, they did not qualify for the Biden student loan debt relief. The court unanimously ruled on Friday that the plaintiffs had no standing.

Before legal challenges stopped it, 26 million borrowers had applied for the Biden student loan debt relief and 16 million were approved, according to the White House.

The Biden administration sought to give up to $10,000 in student debt relief to individual borrowers with incomes less than $125,000 or $250,000 for borrowers filing jointly. For Pell grant recipients the debt relief would be up to $20,000.