After earlier promising that the moratorium on student loan payments would end once and for all at the close of this year, the Biden administration is reportedly considering extending it yet again after federal courts stepped in to temporarily block the program from moving forward.

When he announced the debt forgiveness in August, President Biden said the nearly three-year-old moratorium on payments — initiated by President Trump in March 2020 during the depths of the Covid pandemic at a cost of $4.3 billion a month — would not be extended for an eighth time. Now, however, the Washington Post reports that White House officials are revisiting that pledge after the court-ordered setbacks to the larger program.

Mr. Biden’s promise to wipe out as much as $20,000 of student debt for low- and middle-income earners won rave reviews from progressive Democrats but howls of protests from Republicans who claim the effort is an unconstitutional wealth transfer to high-earning, white-collar workers from working-class American taxpayers who did not borrow money to attend college.

In the wake of last week’s midterm elections, many prominent Democrats credited high turnout among younger voters for the Democrats’ better-than-expected showing, and exit polls suggest that student debt forgiveness may have been one of the primary reasons for that high turnout. While the larger plan to forgive student debt is limited to those earning less than $125,000, the moratorium Mr. Biden is thinking about extending applies to all borrowers regardless of their income.

A panel of judges at the 8th U.S. Court of Appeals issued an injunction Monday preventing the administration from discharging any debt until a lawsuit by Republican attorneys general challenging the executive order can be weighed. A separate judge in Texas declared the program unlawful in a ruling last week. After the rulings, the education department shuttered the online application for loan relief.

Late Thursday, according to the Associated Press, the administration said it would appeal the rulings at the Supreme Court.

In a filing in the Texas case this week, the education department said 26 million Americans filed for student debt relief via the website while it was up, and 16 million of those have already been approved. With as many as 40 million people eligible, the department said millions more are expected to apply.

“Unless the Department is allowed to provide debt relief, we anticipate there could be an historically large increase in the amount of federal student loan delinquency and defaults as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the department said. It also said in the filing that should it extend the payment moratorium yet again, “it will cost taxpayers several billion dollars a month in unrecovered loan revenue.”

On Thursday, the education department issued new guidelines for existing student loan borrowers that will make it easier for them to offload their loans by declaring bankruptcy.

Until now, student loan debt has been treated differently than other forms of debt in bankruptcy proceedings. Lawyers for the education and justice departments — representing taxpayers, who guaranteed the loans in the first place — could challenge the borrowers in court, forcing them to prove their hardship before the debt was discharged.

From now on, though, those lawyers will look at debtors’ expenses and income, and take into consideration such factors as disabilities, employment status, and the student borrower’s longer-term prospects of paying back the loans before deciding whether to let them out of their obligations.

While a bankruptcy judge makes the final decisions, the new guidelines give government lawyers standards for recommending discharge of the loans without what the education department called “unnecessarily burdensome and time-consuming investigations.”

“Today’s guidance outlines a better, fairer, more transparent process for student loan borrowers in bankruptcy,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said. “It will allow Justice Department attorneys to more easily identify cases in which we can recommend discharge of a borrower’s student loans.”

“Congress may have set a higher bar for granting student loan discharges during bankruptcy, but in practice that bar has become very difficult for deserving borrowers to clear,” an undersecretary of education, James Kvaal, said. “This guidance is an important step toward helping struggling borrowers, many of whom never completed college or were misled into debt by dishonest schools.”