President Joe Biden announced Monday that his administration had approved federal student loan relief for more than 150,000 borrowers, bringing the number whose student debt has been canceled during his administration to over 5 million, he said in a White House release.
Although Biden lost the legal battle to deliver on his campaign promise to implement a broad federal student loan forgiveness program, he said Monday that his administration has still "forgiven more student loan debt than any other administration in history."
The 150,000 new beneficiaries announced Monday include more than 80,000 borrowers who were cheated or defrauded by their schools, over 60,000 borrowers with total and permanent disabilities and more than 6,000 public service workers, Biden said in the release.
The Biden administration has focused on revising and expanding federal student loan forgiveness programs that existed before Biden took office. That approach allowed the administration to expand loan forgiveness options despite its failure to implement new federal forgiveness programs after the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s initial plan in 2023.
The Education Department pivoted to existing pathways meant to lift the financial burden of loan repayments on some of the country’s most financially vulnerable borrowers.
Biden on Monday cited improvements to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which allows public servants to have the rest of their student loan debt canceled after they have made a decade’s worth of payments. He also pointed to fixing administrative errors in income-driven repayment programs and expanding the maximum limit for Pell Grants, a form of need-based financial aid for low-income students.
Of the 5 million borrowers who have had some or all of their loan debt canceled over the last four years, 1.4 million spent decades in repayment before they were relieved by the income-driven repayment programs, Biden said. Another 1 million were public service workers, like firefighters and teachers; 1.7 million had been victims of higher education fraud; and 663,000 had total or permanent disabilities.
The Education Department last month withdrew broad plans to forgive loans to borrowers experiencing significant financial hardship as Biden approaches the end of his term.
President-elect Donald Trump and congressional conservatives have been highly critical of the administration’s attempts to cancel student loan debt, broadly arguing that the costly plans would shift the burden of repayment onto people without college degrees and accusing Biden of overstepping his executive power — a notion the Supreme Court affirmed in ruling Biden's initial plan was an unlawful exercise of presidential power in 2023.
Multiple conservative-leaning states challenged both the administration’s first and second attempts at loan forgiveness in court, with the Supreme Court in August denying a Biden administration plea to lift the nationwide injunction on his plan imposed by an appeals court in Missouri.
“Since Day One of my Administration, I promised to ensure higher-education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity,” Biden said in the written statement Monday.
