Here’s Biden’s Next Step Towards Loan Forgiveness – After last week announcing a plan to wipe out $39 billion in student loans for more than 800,000 student loan borrowers, President Joe Biden is likely preparing additional measures designed to achieve the widespread loan forgiveness goals that were shot down by a June 30 Supreme Court ruling.
Joe Biden and His Latest Announcement
On July 14, the Biden administration announced a plan to “fix the failures of the past” and provide loan relief to individuals whose loans may have qualified to be wiped after 20 or 25 years, had they not missed payments or made partial payments on some occasions.
“Starting today, over 800,000 student loan borrowers who have been repaying their loans for 20 years or more will see $39 billion of their loans discharged because of steps my Administration took to fix failures of the past. These borrowers will join the millions of people that my Administration has provided relief to over the past two years – resulting in over $116 billion in loan relief to over 3 million borrowers under my Administration,” Biden said in a statement from the White House Briefing Room.
Biden also promised to continue to “work to bring the promise of college to every American,” and argued that the Supreme Court “made the wrong decision” in shooting down his original plan to wipe up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt for 43 million people.
What Next?
While the Biden administration has not yet confirmed its next step, there are several options for the president and his team on the table. Among those options would be an appeal to Congress – an effort that could get Biden’s agenda passed, if only he can get the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on board.
However, if the president felt confident that he could get sufficient numbers of legislators on board to get a plan passed, he probably would have taken that step before he issued an executive order that he almost certainly knew would be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
If Biden sticks around past 2024, however, there are at least two opportunities for his party to change the makeup of Congress in a way that could theoretically allow him to pass a law that achieves his previously stated goals.
Until then, though, possibly the only option left on the table for the Biden administration would be to expand existing forgiveness programs – something his administration has already done. In May, Biden’s Department of Education approved $42 billion in student loan forgiveness under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program that provides debt relief to borrowers who pursued careers in governmental or non-profit fields.
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, the Biden administration may find itself scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking for every alternative way to relieve the debt of individuals who could be shoehorned into qualifying for existing schemes.
Jack Buckby is 19FortyFive’s Breaking News Editor. He is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
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