Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/22-506_nmip.pdf
Page Number: 3

Cite as:  600 U. S. ____ (2023) 

3 

Syllabus 

(a) The text of the HEROES Act does not authorize the Secretary’s 
loan  forgiveness  program.  The  Secretary’s  power  under  the  Act  to 
“modify”  does  not  permit  “basic  and  fundamental  changes  in  the 
scheme”  designed  by  Congress.  MCI  Telecommunications  Corp.  v. 
American  Telephone  &  Telegraph  Co.,  512  U. S.  218,  225.    Instead, 
“modify” carries “a connotation of increment or limitation,” and must 
be  read  to  mean  “to  change  moderately  or  in  minor  fashion.”    Ibid. 
That is how the word is ordinarily used and defined, and the legal def-
inition is no different. 

The authority to “modify” statutes and regulations allows the Secre-
tary to make modest adjustments and additions to existing provisions, 
not transform them.  Prior to the COVID–19 pandemic, “modifications”
issued under the Act were minor and had limited effect.  But the “mod-
ifications” challenged here create a novel and fundamentally different 
loan forgiveness program.  While Congress specified in the Education 
Act a few narrowly delineated situations that could qualify a borrower 
for loan discharge, the Secretary has extended such discharge to nearly
every borrower in the country.  It is “highly unlikely that Congress”
authorized such a sweeping loan cancellation program “through such
a subtle device as permission to ‘modify.’ ”  Id., at 231. 

The Secretary responds that the Act authorizes him to “waive” legal
provisions  as  well  as  modify  them—and  that  this  additional  term 
“grant[s] broader authority” than would “modify” alone.  But the Sec-
retary’s invocation of the waiver power here does not remotely resem-
ble how it has been used on prior occasions, where it was simply used 
to  nullify  particular  legal  requirements.    The  Secretary  next  argues 
that the power to “waive or modify” is greater than the sum of its parts: 
Because waiver allows the Secretary “to eliminate legal obligations in
their entirety,” the combination of “waive or modify” must allow him 
“to  reduce  them  to  any  extent  short  of  waiver”  (even  if the  power  to
“modify” ordinarily does not stretch that far).  But the challenged loan 
forgiveness program goes beyond even that.  In essence, the Secretary
has drafted a new section of the Education Act from scratch by “waiv-
ing” provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with 
radically new text. 

The Secretary also cites a procedural provision in the HEROES Act
directing the Secretary to publish a notice in the Federal Register, “in-
clud[ing] the terms and conditions to be applied in lieu of such statu-
tory and regulatory provisions” as the Secretary has waived or modi-
§1098bb(b)(2).    In  the  Government’s  view,  that  language
fied. 
authorizes  both  “waiving  and  then  putting  [the  Secretary’s]  own  re-
quirements in”—a sort of “red penciling” of the existing law.  But ra-
ther than implicitly granting the Secretary authority to draft new sub-
stantive statutory provisions at will, §1098bb(b)(2) simply imposes the