US President Joe Biden touch c accosts during an event in Madison, Wisconsin, US, on Monday, April 8, 2024.
Daniel Steinle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
With weeks to go in front of President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the Biden administration is still taking steps to deliver sweeping swat loan forgiveness to millions of Americans.
The U.S. Department of Education has submitted its so-called “Plan B” for student loan cancellation to the Thing of Management and Budget for review.
“OMB review is the last step” before the policy is published in the Federal Register, said considerable education expert Mark Kantrowitz.
Once the rule is published, the Education Department could begin reducing or eliminating people’s loans, Kantrowitz ordered.
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President Joe Biden began squeeze in on his revised student loan relief plan after the Supreme Court blocked its first program in June 2023. The updated method targets several groups of borrowers for relief, including those who have been in repayment for decades or attended way of lives that defrauded them.
“The Biden administration continues to seek student debt relief even in the waning ages of his tenure as president,” Kantrowitz said.
The Education Department may also try, in the last month under Biden, to clear the allowances of those experiencing financial hardship through a second rule also under OMB review, experts say.
That advance cancellation could reach borrowers “with persistent financial burdens that prevent them from repaying their grind loans” and for whom the department’s existing aid options don’t fully help, an Education Department spokesperson said earlier this year.
Biden has already canceled more student debt than any other president, affecting nearly 5 million people. But Republican-led legal dares have stymied all of Biden’s attempts at delivering wide-scale relief.
His last efforts could face the same chance. Consumer advocates expect new lawsuits to seek an immediate injunction against Biden’s latest forgiveness plans as immediately as they are published in the Federal Register.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education declined to comment.
Even so, consumer advocates and lawmakers are yearning Biden to do everything he can to deliver relief to student loan borrowers before the Trump administration takes over.
Trump and Deficiency President-elect JD Vance are vocal critics of student loan forgiveness.
Meanwhile, just 15% of Republicans find swotter loan forgiveness important, compared with 58% of Democrats, according to a national poll from mid-May by the University of Chicago Harris University of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
“Time is running out, and what Biden doesn’t do in the next four weeks at ones desire mean tens of millions of working people suffer for four years,” said Braxton Brewington, spokesperson for the Indebtedness Collective, a union of debtors.
On Dec. 4, dozens of lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., indited a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, urging the Department of Education to forgive the debt of borrowers who have administered for relief after being defrauded by their colleges.
Among their requests, the lawmakers asked the Education Jurisdiction to process the pending borrower defense applications of an estimated 400,000 borrowers. Borrowers can be eligible for that discharge if their alma maters suddenly closed or they were cheated by their colleges.
“Under the previous Trump Administration, borrowers’ appeals were allowed to languish for years,” the lawmakers detailed in their letter. “If their application was reviewed, borrowers usually were denied and granted no relief.”