Biden Withdraws Proposed Regulations on Student Loans and Trans Athletes

The Biden administration on Friday withdrew some of its main outstanding plans to enact significant federal student loan forgiveness and to set rules around the participation of transgender athletes on school sports teams.

The regulations were, at one time, among the administration’s top education policy priorities, and the decision to pull down the proposed regulations was a tacit acknowledgment that they would go nowhere under the administration of incoming President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Criticizing protections for transgender people was a central theme during Mr. Trump’s campaign, and he routinely attacked student debt reform.

But the move was also designed to insulate both policies against immediate manipulation by the incoming administration. The decision helped ensure that the open proposals could not be quickly rewritten, and that the Trump administration would have to at least start the process of introducing its own regulations from scratch.

With the student debt proposals in particular, it also helped avoid the possibility that a future lawsuit might invalidate the legal foundation underpinning them. A ruling against them could doom the policies for many years to come.

The proposed rule around transgender athletes was nuanced. It would have created some protections, prohibiting outright bans. But it also would have allowed schools to exclude some categories of students from playing sports on teams that matched their gender identities.