Starting Monday, hundreds of thousands of federal student loan borrowers will receive emails from their servicers with the subject line “Your student loans have been forgiven.”
The notices will come as part of the Biden administration’s previously announced efforts to cancel debt for 804,000 borrowers who qualify for relief under their repayment plans but haven’t yet received it because of what officials have called administrative failures.
It shouldn’t be a big deal, but prior to the Biden administration, Betsy Devos under Trump was doing everything possible to block even already available student loan forgiveness and throwing up as much roadblocks as possible. The department education had to be sued in court to get loan forgiveness granted for things they should have been helping with not blocking. And even after all that they repeatedly failed to follow their own settlements and court orders for years, just refusing to grant forgiveness. So even though a lot of forgiveness was technically already on the books, having a administration actually helping this process instead of actively trying to prevent it is a huge breath of fresh air. They also previously changed many terms in public service loan forgiveness to help it apply to more people and made lots of other positive changes that luckily the supreme court did not block. At least not yet.
Detractors like Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, who is chairwoman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, have called the relief an abuse of taxpayer money.
“The Biden administration’s blatantly political attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court is shameful. The Biden administration is trampling the rule of law, hurting borrowers, and abusing taxpayers to chase headlines," she said in a statement when the policy was announced last month.
Her daughter owns Grandfather Mountain Nursery, which Virginia Foxx used to own with her husband from 1976-2004.
Grandfather Mountain Nursery was forgiven $25,161 worth of PPP loans in December 2020.
Obviously it’s not an “abuse of taxpayer money” when your own family and generational business can benefit from it.
Good move by the Biden administration.
The relief is targeted at people who enrolled in income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, which allow student loan debts to be forgiven by the federal government once payments have been made for 20 or 25 years, depending on the plan.
That isn’t enough, obviously, but there are people who will be paying student loans their entire lives because the interest is worth more than the loan. Also, even helping this 804,000 people will put more money into the economy, so this is overall a good thing for everyone.
