Biden administration starts canceling student loan debt for 804,000 borrowers

From August 15, hundreds of student loan borrowers will be notified that they no longer need to pay their student loan debt.

They can expect to receive emails from their service providers saying, “Your student loans have been forgiven.”

Some 800,000 plus borrowers with student loan will be notified of the relief in the next few weeks and by the end of the day the Department of Education estimated that it had wiped the debt of more than 200,000 people.

Some 614,000 people are expecting to have the entire amount forfeited while other may have some residual amount left to pay. The relief is for people who enrolled in income-driven repayment plans, which allows student loan debts to be forgiven by the federal government once payments have been made.

student loan reprieve

President Joe Biden said that the account adjustments were to help repair what he termed as a broken student loan system.

“Under these plans, if a borrower makes 20 or 25 years worth of payments, they get the remaining balances of their loans for given. But because of errors and administrative failures of the student loan system that started long before I took office, over 804,000 borrowers never got the credit they earned, and never saw the forgiveness they were promised – even after making payments for decades,” said Biden.

“I was determined to right this wrong,” he said.

Administrators say the entire process could take a few weeks.

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said that the department of Education was standing up for borrowers who did all the right things but whose progress towards forgiveness was uncounted due to past administrative failures.

This step however is not without detractors as Republicans say that it is an abuse of taxpayer funds.

“The Biden administration’s blatantly political attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court is shameful. The Biden administration is trampling the rule of law, hurting borrowers and abusing taxpayers to chase headlines,” said Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx.

The photo above is from Wikipedia