Biden Announces Newest Round of Debt Relief

(USNewsBreak.com) – Student loan debt was undoubtedly one of the biggest debates of last year. When then-candidate Joe Biden ran in 2020, he promised to work toward eliminating it, but when he tried, backlash and several legal challenges met his efforts. Still, his administration persisted and eventually passed some measure of forgiveness. Now, it’s adding more to the total.

On Friday, January 19, President Biden announced that his administration had approved an additional 74,000 borrowers for forgiveness, bringing the total number of Americans who saw some relief to over 3.7 million. The statement said the debt erased with this iteration of forgiveness amounts to nearly $5 billion.

President Biden announced that his administration is forgiving $5 billion in student debt for another 74,000 borrowers, marking the latest round of debt cancellation since the Supreme Court voided the president's student loan forgiveness program. https://t.co/XOZmWg2AnJ

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) January 19, 2024

The administration approved debt relief for almost 44,000 who served the public for at least 10 years, including firefighters, nurses, and teachers. The other nearly 30,000 included those who had made payments for at least 20 years but didn’t receive “the relief they earned through income-driven repayment plans.”

That’s not all. In February, the administration has plans to cancel debt for those individuals who borrowed less than $12,000 in loans and have been repaying them for at least 10 years. Biden is continuing to explore other options, too, following the Supreme Court’s ruling last June that the original forgiveness plan violated federal law. That move would’ve seen millions of Americans receive between $10,000 and $20,000 wiped off their loans.

Government data shows that student loan debt has reached approximately $1.6 trillion, owed by more than 43 million Americans. In all, the Biden Administration has worked to cancel $136 billion so far. According to Biden, the work isn’t over yet. He continued reiterating his promise “to pursue an alternative path to deliver student debt relief” to more borrowers “as quickly as possible.” As the incumbent faces re-election later this year, he might be running out of time to fulfill the promises he made before the last election and achieve as much as he would like.