Less than three weeks before Election Day, the White House plans to sidestep the jumble of legal challenges it’s facing over its student loan forgiveness agenda to tout billions of dollars in new relief.
President Joe Biden lauded the latest tranche of debt cancellation – $4.7 billion for more than 60,000 student loan borrowers, according to administration officials – as a milestone in his efforts to reform the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
For years, the PSLF program, created by Congress in 2007 to cancel the student loan debt of workers in government and many nonprofit jobs, failed to achieve that goal. Before Biden took office, only 7,000 borrowers ever managed to qualify for relief, the Education Department has said.
The announcement planned for Thursday brings the number of borrowers who’ve had their loans forgiven under PSLF to more than one million – a major landmark following allegations of systemic mismanagement that plagued the program for years. It also underscores, once again, Democrats’ eagerness to demonstrate that the party has done its best to deliver on promises of student debt relief as the presidential election looms.
“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. “I will never stop working to make higher education affordable – no matter how many times Republican elected officials try to stop us.”
Unlike the Biden administration’s other strategies for enacting student debt relief, PSLF hasn’t been stalled by lawsuits brought by conservatives. Many previous debt cancellation announcements this year also included forgiveness granted under a different program known as Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE.
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SAVE bases borrowers’ monthly payments on their income. The Education Department has canceled roughly $170 billion because of the program, but it has been paused following a court order in a lawsuit brought by officials from Republican-led states. Oral arguments in a case challenging the relief program’s lawfulness are set to start next week.
In a call with reporters Wednesday, senior Education Department officials did not clarify whether this week’s announcement would have included more loan forgiveness if not for the mountain of pending legal challenges.
Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.
