%1

The White House called on Congress to pass an emergency extension of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) eviction ban yesterday, three days before it expires, insisting the administration does not have the legal power to extend it after a recent Supreme Court ruling, The Hill reported. “Given the recent spread of the delta variant, including among those Americans both most likely to face evictions and lacking vaccinations, President Biden would have strongly supported a decision by the CDC to further extend this eviction moratorium to protect renters at this moment of heightened vulnerability,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement. "Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has made clear that this option is no longer available," she added. The Supreme Court last month left intact the CDC’s moratorium on evictions by a 5-4 vote, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the court’s three liberals. But Kavanaugh also said he agreed with a federal judge’s determination that the CDC had exceeded its authority in enacting the moratorium and argued that it could not be extended again unless by an act of Congress. For that reason, another extension could be reversed by the court if it is challenged by one of the moratorium's many opponents.

Beset by COVID-19 and its fallout, local landlords are offloading their properties to cash-rich institutional investors, and America's real-estate market may never be the same, Reuters reported. Before the pandemic, boyhood friends Michael Murano and Richard Tyson owned 96 rental units in their hometown of Rochester, New York. They offered accommodation to low-income tenants, many in the service industry, from rooming houses to single-family starter homes. Today, they're well on their way to liquidating the entire portfolio. Two-thirds of the units are already gone. The buyers? Large investors with all-cash offers. Many of America's landlords have gone a year and a half without being paid by tenants, who've been protected by several state and local eviction moratoria as well as an umbrella federal ban enacted 11 months ago. The owners have been waiting for $46 billion to help them survive without that income. The funds were approved by Congress months ago, but bureaucracy creaks; only $3 billion has reached them so far, according to U.S. Treasury Department data.

A federal judge is considering a proposed settlement of $1.25 million in a lawsuit filed on behalf of some Southern New Hampshire University students for tuition reimbursement during the coronavirus pandemic, the Associated Press reported. The 3,067 students were enrolled in in-person classes for the spring 2020 semester at SNHU. Their instruction was switched to online that March because of COVID-19. The lead plaintiff is a recent SNHU graduate with a bachelor of science in justice studies. The lawsuit argued the program relies “extensively on in-person instruction, peer collaboration, and access to SNHU’s facilities,” and that those resources were not available to her. The lawsuit said the in-person courses cost more than the online ones and that the students should be compensated. During a hearing Thursday, lawyers for both sides had no objection to the proposed settlement, which they said averages out to several hundred dollars to each student. Chief Judge Landya McCafferty questioned the process that lawyers used to arrive at their fees. She delayed her ruling to give them more time to respond.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said that President Biden does not have the legal authority to unilaterally forgive federal student loans, breaking from fellow Democratic leaders, The Hill reported. Pelosi yesterday argued that Biden can only delay or pause student loan debt by executive order, not cancel it entirely. “He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power,” she said. “That would best be an act of Congress.” Biden has faced steady pressure from progressive Democrats to wipe out up to $50,000 per borrower in federally held student debt through an executive order. While it’s not clear if Biden has the legal authority to do so, many prominent Democrats including Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) argue that he does. Read more.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Tuesday at 10 a.m. EDT titled, "Student Loan Bankruptcy Reform." 

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) yesterday launched a website meant to connect struggling tenants with federal rental aid providers with less than a week until a federal eviction ban is set to expire, The Hill reported. The CFPB’s rental and utility assistance tool is intended to match tenants with the state and local organizations charged with disbursing more than $46 billion in federal aid meant to prevent a wave of evictions. While the federal government has disbursed all of that money to state and local distributors, less than 7 percent of it has reached tenants, landlords and utility companies by the end of June. Millions of U.S. households could face eviction proceedings within days with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) moratorium set to expire on Aug. 1. Researchers at the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated 15 million people in 6.5 million households are at risk of eviction when the moratorium expires.

Walmart will begin offering free college tuition and books to its 1.5 million U.S. employees, the latest effort by the country’s largest private employer to attract and retain workers in a tight labor market, the Washington Post reported. The retail giant said on Tuesday that it will invest nearly $1 billion over the next five years in career training and development programs for workers who want to pursue majors in high-demand fields, such as business administration, supply chain and cybersecurity. The company had previously required its Walmart and Sam’s Club workforce to pay $1 a day to participate in the program. Walmart’s Live Better U education program, which will be free beginning Aug. 16, was created three years ago to help employees advance within the company. Workers can choose from 10 academic partners, including the University of Arizona, the University of Denver, Purdue University Global and Southern New Hampshire University. More than 52,000 employees have participated and 8,000 have graduated since 2018.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said yesterday that the U.S. economic recovery could take a major hit if the Biden administration fails to extend the federal government’s pandemic moratorium on student-loan payments past September, Bloomberg News reported. “Resuming these payments could stall our country’s economic recovery. It could bring millions of loan borrowers to the edge of financial crisis,” Schumer said yesterday. Student-loan debt has almost doubled over the past decade, reaching $1.58 trillion in the first quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the payment moratorium has helped people reduce other debt, such as credit-card balances. Ending the pause threatens to be a drag on an otherwise brisk economic rebound. Senate Democrats, led by Schumer of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, are pressing President Joe Biden’s administration to extend the pause until the spring, and to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt. Warren cited a Pew Charitable Trusts survey showing two-thirds of borrowers saying it would be difficult to afford payments if they resumed the following month. Read more.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on August 3 at 10 a.m. EDT titled, “Student Loan Bankruptcy Reform.” More details forthcoming.

Almost all 2,000 students at South Carolina State University owed money to the school by the end of spring semester this year. Some owed less than a dollar, others were hundreds or even thousands of dollars past due on expenses such as tuition payments and housing fees, the Wall Street Journal reported. Without paying off the bills, many students couldn’t register for the next term or, in the case of seniors, get their diplomas. The school said this month it had wiped away $9.8 million in debt for more than 2,500 students — including current students and some who had already dropped out because they couldn’t afford to pay off their balances and re-enroll. Historically Black colleges and universities, such as South Carolina State, are springing students from the academic version of debtor’s prison, clearing their account balances so they can continue on with, or complete, school. More than 20 HBCUs are using federal pandemic funds for debt relief, according to a tally by the United Negro College Fund, a scholarship organization for private historically Black colleges and universities. HBCUs received $2.6 billion of the $40 billion set aside for higher education under this spring’s American Rescue Plan Act. Their students are overwhelmingly from low-income backgrounds, and many are first-generation college students; schools were told to give priority to the neediest students when distributing a portion of the funds and say these students were hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic downturn.