With less than three weeks before the November election, U.S. President Joe Biden has canceled another $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 borrowers, bringing the number of public service workers who have had their student loans cancelled to over 1 million.
In total, the Biden-Harris Administration has approved $175 billion in student debt relief for nearly 5 million borrowers through various actions, the White House said in a statement.
According to the White House, this brings the number of borrowers approved for debt relief through PSLF to 1 million under the Biden administration.
“If you ever wonder if change is possible, if you ever wonder if what’s broken can be fixed, if you ever wonder whether the government can turn a promise broken into a promise kept, just look at what President Biden and Vice President Harris did for these 1 million public servants across the country today,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told reporters on a Wednesday press call.
Under the Trump administration, the majority of borrowers in public service were not approved for relief through PSLF due to flaws within the program, including rejections due to paperwork errors and processing backlogs. The Biden administration took steps to reform the program, including reevaluating borrowers’ accounts to determine if payments they previously made would bring them to the threshold for relief.
These fixes have resulted in incremental batches of relief over the past few years; in July, for example, the Education Department approved another 35,000 in PSLF for $1.2 billion in debt cancellation.
Additionally, Biden’s second attempt at broader student-loan forgiveness is also stalled in court. After the Supreme Court struck down his first try at broad debt relief last summer, the Education Department announced a Plan B that would forgive student debt for borrowers under the Higher Education Act of 1965, expected to benefit over 30 million borrowers.
While the department has not yet released a final rule for the relief, a federal court placed a preliminary injunction on the plan following a lawsuit from GOP attorneys general who said the department was violating administration procedure by planning to implement the relief ahead of schedule.
A senior administration official told reporters on the Wednesday press call that the Education Department will continue moving forward with targeted forms of debt relief for borrowers while its broader plans remain on hold as the legal process progresses.
Republicans have described the Democratic president’s student loan forgiveness approach as an overreach of authority and an unfair benefit to college-educated borrowers while others receive no such relief.
Earlier this month, St. Louis-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump, issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Biden administration from “mass canceling” student loans and forgiving principal or interest under the plan, pending the outcome of the state’s lawsuit.
