President Joe Biden announced another batch of student loan forgiveness Friday for 277,000 borrowers. The canceled debt adds up to $7.4 billion.
Most of those borrowers signed up for the president’s signature income-driven repayment plan – Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE. Through SAVE, people who originally borrowed a small amount ($12,000 or less) and have been paying it off for at least a decade are eligible for relief.
Others affected are 65,700 borrowers participating through other income-driven plans who should have qualified for relief but did not because their loan servicers wrongfully put them into forbearance. Fixes to those plans account for nearly half of the loans forgiven in the announcement Friday.
The final bucket includes a few thousand borrowers participating in Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which relieves the loans for people working in government jobs or positions that give back to the community. Biden has been working to fix various administrative problems that have long plagued the program, and the discharges announced Friday are the result of one such adjustment.
The latest batch of student loan debt relief brings the total amount forgiven under Biden to $153 billion. In all, the administration says nearly 4.3 million Americans have had their student loans relieved thanks to its actions.
That works out to about 1 in 10 federal borrowers who’ve been approved for relief.
“From day one of my administration, I promised to fight to ensure higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity,” Biden said in a statement Friday. “I will never stop working to cancel student debt – no matter how many times Republican elected officials try to stop us.”
Earlier this week, Biden announced the details of a separate proposal to provide broad relief to targeted groups of borrowers. The result of a federal rulemaking process that began last year, the plan would bring forgiveness to 30 million borrowers total. The president pursued the rulemaking route after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his original plan for mass student loan forgiveness, which used a law that gives the president special authority during emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
As with that original plan, Biden’s new efforts at fulfilling his campaign promise are bound to face legal and political hurdles.
Various lawsuits have challenged his strategies, including a complaint filed in late March by multiple Republican attorneys general framing the SAVE plan as another unconstitutional attempt at mass student debt cancelation.
Republicans in Washington this week slammed the president for prioritizing student loan forgiveness at a time when the college financial aid process has been thrust into turmoil for many high school students. In a statement Friday, Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the chairwoman of the House education panel, told Biden to cut it out.
“We know that instead of doing its job the administration focused time, energy, and resources on its illegal student loan scheme,” she said. “And that has been frustrating, especially since it has jeopardized the academic journey of millions of students.”
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