The Biden administration stopped taking applications for student loan forgiveness Friday after a federal judge in Texas struck down the president’s $400 billion debt relief giveaway.

“Courts have issued orders blocking our student debt relief program,” a note on the federally run loan forgiveness application page studentaid.gov declared.

 “As a result, at this time, we are not accepting applications. We are seeking to overturn those orders.”

The halt came one day after US District Judge Mark Pittman rejected Biden’s executive action to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for tens of millions of Americans.

Pittman ruled that the White House did not have “clear congressional authorization to create a $400 billion student loan forgiveness program.”

“In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone,” Pittman wrote in his order.

The program was already on hold as the St. Louis-based Eighth Circuit County of Appeals considers a separate lawsuit by six states challenging it.

In August, Biden invoked emergency powers under the COVID-19 pandemic to authorize the loan forgiveness program under the 2003 HEROES Act following a pressure campaign from congressional Democrats led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

The law in question allows the secretary of education to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs … as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”

 Pittman, who was nominated to the federal bench by former President Donald Trump in 2017, ruled that the HEROES Act did not give Biden the authority to cancel billions of dollars in federally held student debt without congressional approval.

The Biden administration said Friday the Justice Department had already appealed the court’s decision.

“Amidst efforts to block our debt relief program, we are not standing down,”  Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.  ‘[It’s] necessary to give borrowers and working families breathing room as they recover from the pandemic and to ensure they succeed when repayment restarts.”

More than 16 million applications had already been approved and a total of 26 million had started the process, Cardona said.

“Despite this decision, we will never stop fighting for the millions of hardworking students and borrowers across the country,” he said.

Last week, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied an emergency application to block the program, the second time she had done so in a matter of weeks.

Under Biden’s plan, borrowers are eligible for forgiveness of up to $10,000 in federal student debt if they have an annual income under $125,000. Federal Pell grant recipients are eligible to have up to $20,000 in debt written off.

Biden’s announcement caused an uproar among Republicans and conservatives who say it is both illegal and would worsen decades-high inflation.

However, court challenges have been slow in coming due to difficulty finding plaintiffs who have standing — that is, an argument that shows they are directly harmed by the action.

Pittman was ruling on a lawsuit filed by two plaintiffs, Myra Brown and Alexander Taylor, who are not eligible for the program — Brown because her loans are commercially held and Taylor because he didn’t receive a Pell grant.

The administration said they weren’t harmed by the loan forgiveness program and their “unhappiness that some other borrowers are receiving a greater benefit than they are” did not give them grounds to sue.

Pittman said they were harmed, however, because the government did not take public comment on eligibility requirements for the program, meaning they had no chance to provide input on a program from which they would be at least be partially excluded.

The matter is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court, regardless of how the lower courts rule on the issue.

With Post wires