With just days left in office, President Joe Biden announced Monday that his administration has approved student loan relief for more than 150,000 borrowers, bringing the total number of people who have had their student debt canceled under the administration Biden at more than 5 million, he said in a White House statement.
Although Biden lost the legal battle to fulfill his campaign promise to implement a sweeping federal student loan forgiveness program, the president said Monday that his administration has still “forgiven more student debt than any other administration in the ‘history”.
Among the 150,000 new beneficiaries announced Monday are more than 80,000 borrowers who were deceived or defrauded by their schools, more than 60,000 borrowers with total or permanent disabilities and more than 6,000 public employees, Biden said in the statement .
The Biden administration has focused on revising and expanding federal student loan forgiveness programs that existed before Biden took office. This approach allowed the administration to expand loan forgiveness options despite its failure to implement new federal forgiveness programs after the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s initial 2023 plan.
The Department of Education has moved toward pre-existing avenues intended to ease the financial burden of loan payments on some of the nation’s most financially vulnerable borrowers.
Biden on Monday cited improvements to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which allows public workers to cancel the remainder of their student debt after making a decade of payments. He also stressed the need to correct administrative errors in income-based repayment programs and expand the maximum limit for Pell Grants, a form of need-based financial aid for low-income students.
Of the 5 million borrowers who had some or all of their debt forgiven in the past four years, 1.4 million spent decades repaying before receiving relief from income-driven repayment programs , Biden said. Another million were civil servants, such as firefighters and teachers; 1.7 million were victims of higher education fraud; and 663,000 had total or permanent disability.
Monday’s announcement comes weeks after the Education Department withdrew its broad plans to provide loan forgiveness to borrowers experiencing significant financial hardship as its term nears.
President-elect Donald Trump and congressional conservatives have been highly critical of the administration’s attempts to cancel student debt, largely arguing that the costly plans would shift the burden of repayment onto Americans without college degrees and blaming Biden to overstep his executive power — a notion that the Supreme Court upheld by ruling that Biden’s original plan constituted an illegal exercise of presidential power in 2023.
The administration’s first and second loan forgiveness attempts were legally challenged by several conservative-leaning states, with the Supreme Court in August 2024 rejecting a call from the Biden administration to lift the national injunction on its forgiveness plan imposed by a Missouri appeals court.
“Since my first day in office, I have promised to ensure that higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity,” Biden said in the written statement Monday.
