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.
Let’s read that again. No changes in policy are happening, the Biden administration is literally just applying the literal basic terms of the already-on-the-books-and-already-lawful repayment plan to nearly a million people who were supposed to have their debts forgiven already.
This point will be lost in the reaction to this new approach. These people have been paying back their debt for a long time. Errors have been made. Relief is on the way.
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.