The Biden administration has approved another $4.5 billion in student loan debt relief for public service workers, the Department of Education announced Thursday.
The approval will benefit about 60,000 people participating in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which provides debt relief for borrowers who work in fields like teaching and law enforcement, after at least 10 years of payments on educational loans. The White House said more than 1 million public service workers have received debt forgiveness under the Biden administration, a massive increase in a program that had been hounded by administrative problems for years.
“Before President Biden and Vice President Harris entered the White House, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was so riddled by dysfunction that just 7,000 Americans ever qualified and countless public servants were trapped making payments on debts that should have been forgiven,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “From Day One, the Biden-Harris administration made fixing this broken program a top priority, and today, I’m tremendously proud that over one million teachers, nurses, social workers, veterans, and other public servants have received lifechanging loan forgiveness.”
A growing tally: The latest round of debt relief means that about 4.8 million borrowers have received student loan forgiveness worth more than $175 billion during the Biden administration, equal to about 11% of all outstanding student debt (see the CNN chart below).
President Joe Biden had hoped to do significantly more, but his plan to provide $400 billion in debt forgiveness to as many as 45 million people was rejected by the Supreme Court in 2023, and a modified plan intended to replace that effort has been hung up in the courts by legal challenges from Republican officials in several states.
The issue has political ramifications, with Biden receiving some criticism from supporters for failing to deliver on his major relief effort even as he provided the largest student loan debt forgiveness in history. Vice President Kamala Harris said recently that she would continue to push for loan forgiveness, but it’s not clear if the issue is playing much of a role in the 2024 election.
“We are fighting, and I’m going to continue to fight for student debt relief,” Harris said on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “It’s a barrier to people being able to think, even think about starting a family, buying a home. We need to give people relief.”
