The Biden administration indicated Friday that it is scrapping its proposed plan to provide student loan forgiveness for upwards of 25 million borrowers. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that given the limited time and resources available in the final weeks of the administration, and the legal challenges facing the proposal, the department would focus instead on "helping at-risk borrowers return to repayment successfully."
President Joe Biden had big plans for student loan debt forgiveness when he entered the White House, but his initial effort to provide roughly $400 billion in debt forgiveness to as many as 45 million people was rejected by the Supreme Court in 2023. A second, revised effort has been hung up in the courts by legal challenges from Republican officials in several states, and the incoming Trump administration was expected to bring it swiftly to an end in any event.
Still, the administration has pushed ahead by providing debt relief to specific groups of people, including public service workers and those who were involved in fraudulent for-profit schools. On Friday, the Biden administration announced that it was forgiving student loans for another 54,900 borrowers who work in public service, at a cost of $4.28 billion. "This relief -- which is the result of significant fixes that the Administration has made to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program -- brings the total loan forgiveness by the Administration to approximately $180 billion for nearly five million Americans, including $78 billion for 1,062,870 borrowers through PSLF," the Department of Education said in a press release.
Republican lawmakers, who have fought the student loan relief effort every step of the way, applauded the demise of the Biden plan. "The Biden-Harris administration's student loan schemes were always a lie," Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, said in a statement. "With today's latest withdrawal, they are admitting these schemes were nothing more than a dishonest attempt to buy votes by transferring debt onto taxpayers who never went to college or worked to pay off their loans."