Although the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s signature student loan forgiveness program in late June, his administration has found ways to cancel more than $48 billion in debt since then.

The cancellations have come through existing federal student loan forgiveness programs, which are limited to specific categories of borrowers, such as public-sector workers, people defrauded by for-profit colleges, and borrowers who have paid for at least 20 years.

These programs are separate from the rejected forgiveness plan, which would have canceled about $430 billion of the $1.6 trillion of outstanding federal student loan debt all at one time.

The Biden administration has been granting student loan forgiveness through these existing programs on a rolling basis since coming into office and has discharged a total of $127 billion for nearly 3.6 million people to date.

  • OldWoodFrame
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    8 months ago

    The cancellations have come through existing federal student loan forgiveness programs

    So…is Biden “doing” anything? If it’s just the same programs…I don’t see why we would be saying “Biden is continuing to cancel debt” at all, really. The question is if the admin is using executive orders to make forgiveness easier or something.

    • JustZ@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Well, that’s because you don’t know enough about this to have an opinion. The Biden administration has streamlined and made automatic processes that used to have to be manually done by the borrower, many of whom did not even know they were eligible for. One of the administration steps was to identify from existing records all of the borrowers who qualify for these programs but were apparently unaware of it.