The Biden administration announced Friday the approval of $4.28 billion in additional student loan relief for 54,900 borrowers across the country who work in public service.
This relief brings the total loan forgiveness by the administration to approximately $180 billion for nearly 5 million Americans, according to the Education Department.
“Four years ago, the Biden-Harris Administration made a pledge to America’s teachers, service members, nurses, first responders, and other public servants that we would fix the broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and I’m proud to say that we delivered,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said.
Some Democrats on Capitol Hill have been pushing for the administration to forgive borrowers who are eligible before Biden leaves office.
“We’ve got to step up and say to Joe Biden, ‘You can’t go back to Delaware until you get this done, buddy,’” Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the No. 2 Democrat said of borrowers who were defrauded by colleges.
They also expressed concern that President-elect Donald Trump’s administration would not provide the same level of debt relief to borrowers.
“During his first term President Trump refused to deliver meaningful debt relief for borrowers. His administration ignored or denied borrowers defense applications for years,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass) said earlier this month. “President Trump’s negligence has led to harm, pain for people across the country.”
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program was created by a bipartisan act of Congress and signed into law by then-President George W. Bush in 2007. The program forgives loans for borrowers who make 10 years of payments while employed in specific public service jobs like teaching, nursing or working for a nonprofit.
When the first group of borrowers became eligible in 2017, the program had a 99 percent denial rate, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Borrowers were often told they were denied because they weren’t given credit by their loan servicers for past payments, or they were incorrectly told they didn’t qualify for the program.
The American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, filed a lawsuit against then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in 2019, accusing her agency of mismanaging the program.
The lawsuit accused the Trump administration of arbitrarily and capriciously rejecting loan forgiveness applications, failing to properly oversee the loan servicers it hires to administer the program. They ended up settling in 2021.
