The Biden administration is canceling even more student loan debt, just a few months after the Supreme Court denied their efforts in other ways.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced that $1.2 billion of student debt would be canceled for thousands of borrowers throughout the country.
In total, about 153,000 Americans will benefit from this student loan cancellation. It applies to those who were eligible under the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, repayment plan, which the Biden administration passed in 2023.
In June of last year, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling that said Biden couldn’t use executive power to give almost 40 million Americans student loan relief.
Now, the Biden administration is going around the Supreme Court to cancel some student loan debt in other ways.
In a statement, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said this week:
“With today’s announcement, we are once again sending a clear message to borrowers who had low balances: if you’ve been paying for a decade, you’ve done your part, and you deserve relief. Under President Biden’s leadership, our Administration has now approved loan forgiveness for nearly 3.9 million borrowers, and our historic fight to cancel student debt isn’t over yet.”
According to the press release, those who have been repaying their loans “after as little as 10 years” and had $12,000 or less in total debt for higher education will have that outstanding debt forgiven.
The Biden administration has said the White House has used executive action to cancel a total of $138 billion in student loan debt for almost 4 million borrowers.
Efforts to cancel student loan debt by the Biden administration began in August of 2022. Then, Biden announced a plan that would’ve canceled as much as $10,000 in student loan debt for recipients of non-Pell Grants and as much as $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants.
This was going to be done using the 2003 HEROES Act as the justification.
That legislation says that the Secretary of Education can “waive or modify” any provisions of programs for student financial assistance when a national emergency is going on so that recipients are “not placed in a worse position financially.”
The White House issued a press release that said:
“This shortened time to forgiveness will particularly help community college and other borrowers with smaller loans and put many on track to being free of student debt faster than ever before.
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration’s SAVE plan, 85% of future community college borrowers will be debt free within 10 years. The Department will continue to regularly identify and discharge other borrowers eligible for relief under this provision on SAVE.”
Biden seems to be continuing to push forward on student loan debt forgiveness to pander to the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party. This is despite the fact that a majority of Americans continue to say that they aren’t in favor of using tax dollars to do so.
