WASHINGTON — More than six months after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s ambitious program to erase $430 billion in student loan debt, the White House has been rolling out smaller, more targeted relief programs that it says have now canceled $132 billion in debt for more than 3.6 million Americans.
At the time of the court's decision, it appeared that Biden wasn't going to be make good on one of the biggest promises he made to young voters, who helped propel him into the White House. But as he's gone about doing the same work more slowly, he seems to be getting little credit from those same voters.
On Friday, the administration said that it’s fast-tracking a key provision of the Saving on a Valuable Education plan — known as SAVE — that was scheduled to take effect this summer. Starting next month, borrowers enrolled in SAVE who took out less than $12,000 in loans and have been paying them back for at least 10 years will get their remaining debt canceled right away. With each additional $1,000 of debt, the window for forgiveness increases by a year. For example, a student who took out $13,000 in loans will now have their debt wiped out if they’ve been paying it back for 11 years, or in 12 years for those who borrowed $14,000 — and so on.
Separately, eligible borrowers don’t need to wait 10 years to get some financial benefit from the SAVE plan, which has a more generous formula for calculating income-based repayments than previous government programs. Most low-income borrowers will pay less. For example, a borrower making $38,000 a year with $25,000 in public student loans would see their payment drop from $134 to $43 a month, according to the Department of Education.
The White House said almost seven million borrowers have signed up for SAVE.
“I won’t back down from using every tool at our disposal to get student loan borrowers the relief they need to reach their dreams,” Biden said in a written statement.
Democrats are trying to motivate younger voters ahead of crucial months of the 2024 presidential campaign. According to an NBC News poll in November, Republican front-runner Donald Trump holds a slight advantage within the margin of error in the survey among voters ages 18 to 34 (46% to 42%) — a reversal from past election results and past NBC News polls.
Biden initially announced his broad student debt relief forgiveness plan in 2022, ahead of the midterm elections. The Supreme Court struck it down the following summer, ruling that a president doesn’t have the authority for such a broad policy under the law.
Since then, the White House has used other tools that no president had ever used to this extent. For example, using anti-fraud and consumer protection regulations, the administration has forgiven $22.5 billion for more than 1.3 million borrowers who claim they were cheated by their schools or that their schools closed.
The administration is now ramping up efforts to communicate that to voters. In South Carolina, some Democratic voters that NBC News spoke with said they were disappointed with the Biden administration — and cited what they perceived as a lack of results on student loan debt forgiveness as one of the reasons.
“I feel like my generation, we were promised that student loans would be erased and that hasn’t happened,” said Nashonda Hunter, 41. “We see how much aid that we’re sending over to foreign countries, and there are so many Americans that are suffering.”
That comment, while anecdotal, reveals some of the challenges that the Biden campaign is facing: ensuring that voters give the president credit for policies he has focused on.
Some Biden staffers have been frustrated that the president’s efforts on student debt relief haven’t gotten more attention. Acknowledging that, last week Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., introduced Biden at Mother Emanuel AME Church and highlighted the administration’s efforts to revamp loan assistance program for public workers such as teachers, police officers, firefighters and federal and state employees.
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“But for some strange reason,” Clyburn said, “we don’t see reports about that.”
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Diane Stuckey Bruce, who works at South Carolina State University, said she’d been paying off student loans since 2002 and never missed a payment. But the debt was crushing — and didn’t allow her to buy a home.
Then, in late 2021, she said she had her entire remaining student loan debt — $263,585.35 — forgiven through the program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF).
“I’ll never forget that day for the rest of my life,” she said, calling it a game changer. “It was the biggest blessing I have ever received.”
The White House has touted that it receives notes from constituents thankful for the loan relief.
“I actually sat and cried,” one writer who was worried they’d have to refinance their home to pay off the debt. “I am so relieved and my heart overflows with gratitude.”
Still, while the debt forgiveness programs have been popular on the political left, many Republicans have come out strongly against them and praised the Supreme Court for striking down the administration’s wide-ranging debt forgiveness plan, arguing that it was unfair for people who paid off their debts to have their tax dollars used to subsidize others who didn’t. GOP presidential candidates sounded off on the issue last year.
“Why should a truck driver have to pay for somebody that got a degree in zombie studies?” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at an Iowa event in August. “It doesn’t make sense.”
On Friday, Republican members slammed the White House and the Department of Education for the new debt forgiveness plan that they argue is too expensive.
“President Biden is downright desperate to buy votes before the election — so much so that he green-lights the Department of Education to dump even more kerosene on an already raging student debt fire,” said the Republican chair of the House Education Committee, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, after Friday’s announcement. “It’s clear that the Biden administration needs a good old-fashioned dose of fiscal common sense — all it knows how to do is spend like a drunken sailor.”
