Biden administration found to have silently forgiven billions in student debt

Brady Knox

March 06, 10:54 PM March 06, 10:54 PM

While public attention has swirled around Supreme Court holdups over the Biden administration's ambitious student debt forgiveness plan, billions of dollars in debt have already been forgiven quietly.

Over 770,000 students have applied for debt forgiveness through an Education Department program that allows borrowers to assert a defense to repayment if it can be proven that their school misled them or broke state law, according to the Los Angeles Times. The program began toward the end of the Obama administration but has gained significant traction in the Biden administration.

BIDEN’S CHANGES TO STUDENT LOANS MEANS THE VAST MAJORITY OF BORROWERS WILL NEVER REPAY THEIR DEBT

Through the program, more than $6 billion in student loan cancellations are expected to be shelled out to more than 200,000 students from over 150 schools. Additionally, 64,000 people are slated to receive a response from the Education Department in the ensuing months.

“I think that the Biden administration recognizes that there is this legal obligation [to borrower defense applicants], in that there has to be a process, it has to be fair, it has to be timely,” Eileen Connor, president and director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, told the Los Angeles Times.

“People can’t be waiting for seven, eight years with their entire life on hold,” she added.

The several billion dollars forgiven by the program falls far short of the amount the Biden administration aimed to forgive, but the administration's efforts look increasingly dead in the water. The Supreme Court appears prepared to block Biden's forgiveness plan definitively, leaving it up to the Education Department to forgive as much as possible through existing programs.