Her remarks stood in sharp contrast to the pressure campaign that Schumer, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other progressives have been organizing for months to persuade Biden to swiftly wipe out the debt for tens of millions of loan borrowers.

Schumer has been leading the calls to cancel as much as $50,000 of federal student loan debt, which he has repeatedly said Biden can accomplish with “the flick of a pen.”

On Tuesday, Schumer — who wore a face covering emblazoned with “#CancelStudentDebt” around the Capitol — said he believed they were making progress in persuading the Biden administration to act. He said that White House concerns about the legality of forgiving student loan debt had largely gone away. “We don’t hear much of that anymore,” Schumer said.

But Pelosi, in her most sweeping comments on the student debt issue, said on Wednesday that executive action is not available to the Biden administration.

“The president can’t do it — so that’s not even a discussion,” she said. “Not everybody realizes that, but the president can only postpone, delay but not forgive” student loans. It would take an act of Congress, not an executive order, to cancel student loan debt, she said.

Pelosi said that it was up for discussion how lawmakers should structure any student debt cancellation program, describing the policy debate as a question of whether to provide relief to “more people with even less debt or fewer people with more debt.”

But she also raised concerns about the fairness of student loan debt cancellation. She cited the example of a family without a child in college having to pay taxes “to forgive somebody else’s obligations.”

Canceling student loan debt, Pelosi said, “has to be viewed in a fair way where we have something that gives opportunity — that’s the big word, opportunity — to all of America’s families.”

Progressives who back widespread debt cancellation shot back at Pelosi’s remarks. “Suppose your child did not want to go fight countless and endless shadow wars across the globe, at this time, but you’re paying taxes to fund all of that,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said on Twitter. “You may not be happy about it!”

Biden has already declared publicly that he’s unwilling to cancel $50,000 per borrower but has said he’s more comfortable with $10,000 per borrower, an amount of loan forgiveness that he promised on the campaign trail.

The White House has said it is reviewing whether it has the legal powers to cancel student loan debt through executive action.

Trump administration officials at the Education Department in January issued a legal opinion that concludes the agency lacks the power to cancel large swaths of student loan debt without legislation.

The Biden administration is not bound to follow that legal opinion, but it has not publicly rescinded or changed the memo, which remains posted on the Education Department’s website.

Warren, who first proposed canceling student loan debt using executive authority during her 2020 presidential campaign, has argued that it is clear that federal law already empowers the secretary of education to forgive the student loans owed to the Education Department.

“The administration has the power to do this with the stroke of a pen, so we’re calling on them to do it,” Warren said on Tuesday.