The Biden administration announced Thursday it is racing to cancel student loans for more than 60,000 public service workers. The move comes just 18 days before the 2024 election and brings the number of public service workers who have now benefitted from such taxpayer-funded largesse to over one million.
The gift delivers $4.5 billion in debt relief to teachers, firefighters, and other service workers who have been dutifully meeting loan repayment obligations for over a decade, the Hill reports.
The administration claims fixes it has made to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program over the past four years has made the windfall possible, which has resulted in upwards of one million public service workers seeing loan forgiveness, costing some $175 billion, the Hill report states.
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Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said the move makes good on an administration promise:
Before President Biden and Vice President Harris entered the White House, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was so riddled by dysfunction that just 7,000 Americans ever qualified, and countless public servants were trapped making payments on debts that should have been forgiven.
From Day One, the Biden-Harris administration made fixing this broken program a top priority, and today, I’m tremendously proud that over one million teachers, nurses, social workers, veterans, and other public servants have received lifechanging loan forgiveness.
The loan forgiveness comes weeks before the election, with officials giving no indication if borrowers can expect more debt relief in Biden’s last few months in office.
Unlike other debt relief programs the Biden administration has attempted, this forgiveness is unlikely to be challenged in court as it is based on a different authority that is more difficult to fight.
Back in May the White House issued a statement announcing some 160,000 people in the United States would have their student loans canceled, erasing a total of $7.7 billion in student debt for those people, as Breitbart News reported.
Biden’s latest announcement comes after he announced in April that his administration would be canceling student debt for more than 270,000 people.
Those who had their student debt canceled in April were borrowers who were enrolled in Biden’s SAVE Plan.
Republicans call the Democratic president’s student loan forgiveness an overreach of authority and an unfair benefit to college-educated borrowers while others receive no such relief as they fulfill their commitments to paying back their loans in full.
