Biden officials cancel $7.4B more of federal student debt
The Biden administration announced an additional $7.4 billion in student loan cancellations for some 277,000 borrowers on Friday, building on plans announced days earlier to provide debt relief for millions of borrowers by the fall if new rules the White House has put forward hold up.
The latest round of relief reflects a strategy the White House has embraced by taking smaller, targeted actions for subsets of borrowers that it hopes will add up to a significant result, after a larger plan to wipe out more than $400 billion of debt was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.
It also comes as President Joe Biden aims to shore up support with young voters who may be disproportionately affected by soaring education costs but also may be drifting away over his policy on Israel and the war in the Gaza Strip.
Taken together with previous actions, the announcement on Friday brought the total of debt forgiven to $153 billion and touching around 4.3 million borrowers so far, the administration said. The administration hopes to forgive some or all loans held by some 30 million borrowers in total. The administration said the 277,000 people it identified would have been notified by email on Friday.
“We’ve approved help for roughly 1 out of 10 of the 43 million Americans who have federal student loans,” Miguel A. Cardona, the education secretary, told reporters before the announcement.
The new round of cancellations involves three categories of borrowers who qualified under existing programs, with the bulk of the forgiveness going to around 207,000 people who borrowed relatively small amounts — $12,000 or less — and were enrolled in the administration’s incomedriven repayment plan, known as SAVE.
An additional 65,000 enrolled in repayment plans will see reductions in what they owe through adjustments correcting what Cardona described as “administrative and servicing failures.”
The remaining group would see their loans forgiven through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, having already qualified after making 10 years of payments while engaging in public service.