When President Trump instituted a freeze on federal student loan repayments in mid-March 2020, which was codified in the CARES Act soon after, it made sense. COVID-19 had just descended on the country, and we were all trying to get our heads around how dangerous it might be and how to cope with it. Lockdowns, at least short-term, seemed to make sense, and even in their absence the pandemic was expected to put a major hit on the economy.

Fast-forward to today: Widespread lockdowns are long over. We’re into the second-booster phase of vaccinations. The economy is humming along to the tune of 3.6 percent unemployment overall, and just 2 percent for Americans with at least four-year degrees. Yet President Biden just extended the repayment freeze, the seventh such extension. The apparent justification? Inflation is high, and borrowers are not ready to put money into the repayment can they’ve seen repeatedly kicked down the road.

At this point, there is no logical economic reason to extend the pause, and there probably hasn’t been one since the CARES Act freeze ended on September 30, 2020. By then the economy had already rebounded, while today’s inflation rationale makes no sense since more money in the economy generally makes inflation worse. And why should borrowers say they are prepared to repay when there is always a good chance another pause is coming, especially if they say they are not ready?

Given the gossamer economic logic for the latest freeze extension, it appears the long-term goal cannot be a return to normal repayment, but to move from temporary freeze to some kind of permafrost. This will likely consist of piecemeal forgiveness beyond the normal workings of income-driven repayment plans and Public Service Loan Forgiveness; ongoing searches for plausible accusations that students were defrauded by schools; and legislation to cancel some debt, though probably not the glaringly regressive $50,000 per borrower championed by the hard Left.

There is, keep in mind, a huge cost to the freeze, because it does not just preserve payments for a future date. The federal government is missing out on now-forgiven interest payments, and frozen time counts towards eventual forgiveness of remaining debt, as if payments had actually been made. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the freeze has cost the federal government more than $100 billion as of mid-March 2022.

Federal student lending has been essentially one, big, unintended consequence, from helping fuel skyrocketing college prices, to enabling credential inflation, to confusing the heck out of servicers, borrowers, and the American public. The muddy slide to permafrost is only the latest evidence that Washington should get out of student lending, and never should have violated the Constitution by getting involved in the first place.