Yes, Student Loan Cancellation Is Still On The Table — Key Details

WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 04: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at a Fourth of July BBQ celebration on the South Lawn of the White House to… [+] celebrate Independence Day on July 4, 2021 in Washington, DC. To commemorate the nation’s 245th birthday, President Biden and first lady Jill Biden entertained nearly 1,000 guests, including COVID response critical workers and military families. (Photo courtesy of Getty Images/Alex Wong)
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President Biden has not established a comprehensive student loan forgiveness program. That isn’t to say the concept isn’t alive. Student debt forgiveness was neither included in Biden’s budget blueprint or his big “human infrastructure” program unveiled earlier this spring. This sparked speculation that the President had completely abandoned the project.
However, this isn’t always the case. Advocates have been urging Biden to use executive action to cancel all student loans. His decision to leave student loan forgiveness out of his budget proposal and infrastructure plan — both of which would require congressional approval — could simply reflect the fact that student debt relief is unlikely to pass both the House and the Senate, where Democrats have small majorities and are preoccupied with more pressing issues.
Here’s where things stand in terms of student debt forgiveness.
Biden has continuously indicated support for broad student loan forgiveness, but prefers a more “targeted” approach, advocating for a $10,000 debt cancellation across the board and argues that current student loan forgiveness programs should be enhanced and expanded. He has been a skeptic of more generous student debt cancellation ideas of $50,000 or more, as proposed by advocacy groups and top Democrats in Congress. Biden has also expressed fears that granting comprehensive student loan forgiveness could favor higher-income earners or Ivy League grads, concerns that advocates say are unfounded.
While Biden has expressed support for some form of student loan forgiveness, he has expressed reservations about utilizing presidential action to achieve it. The president has broad authority under the Higher Education Act, according to congressional Democrats and student loan legal experts, to “compromise, waive, or release” a borrower’s student loan liability. The HEROES Act, which was used by both former President Trump and Vice President Biden to suspend billions of dollars in student loan interest after the original CARES Act moratorium expired, provides authority to “waive or modify” federal student aid programs during a national emergency, according to advocates. Other higher education legal experts, on the other hand, disagree with these conclusions, claiming that the objective of Congress when establishing these statutes was never to cancel all student loans.
Biden asked his staff to conduct a formal study of legislative authorities that could be used to achieve mass student loan forgiveness by executive action in April. It’s been more than three months since the review began, but there are still no evidence that it’s been fully completed or that any definitive findings have been reached.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FOR YOU
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has stuck to its declared strategy of utilizing executive action to implement more targeted student debt cancellation. The following are examples of these actions:
The Biden administration revoked a Trump-era regulation that permitted borrowers awarded relief under the Borrower Defense to Repayment program, which cancels federal student loan debt for borrowers misled by their schools, to have their loans partially cancelled. Around 72,000 borrowers who were eligible for Borrower Defense relief but only received partial cancellation will be able to have their whole student loan balances cancelled as a result of the move. The entire amount of assistance will be roughly $1 billion.
Around 41,000 disabled borrowers who had received a student debt discharge based on their disability had their loans reinstated by Biden. Because they failed to submit appropriate documents during a post-discharge monitoring period, these borrowers’ discharges were revoked. The reinstated loans will be forgiven as a result of Biden’s actions, and he has waived additional monitoring obligations for the rest of the pandemic.
Congress enacted Biden’s recovery plan in March, which included funding for schools and universities. Shortly after, the administration modified policy advice to let institutions to use these monies to erase institutional student loan debt for pandemic-affected students. Since then, thousands more students have had millions of dollars in student loan debt forgiven by a rising number of universities.
The Biden administration announced last month that through the Borrower Defense program, 18,000 former students of the now-defunct ITT Technical Institutes would receive $500 million in student debt cancellation.

While these efforts have resulted in the cancellation of tens of thousands of student loan debts, the entire amount of student loan forgiveness is a minuscule proportion of the country’s outstanding student loan debt. Advocates are pressuring Vice President Biden’s administration to go even further.
The discussion over comprehensive student loan forgiveness is far from ended, and the topic is still alive and well. Here are a few things to keep an eye on during the next months:
The results of the Biden administration’s legal assessment of student loan forgiveness might be released at any time.
On September 30, the existing moratorium on federal student loan payments and interest will come to an end. There is growing support for extending the deadline, maybe until 2022, to give debtors more time and give the administration more time to implement broader changes.
Advocacy groups have urged the Biden administration to expand Borrower Defense relief (tens of thousands of applications remain unprocessed), cancel student loan debt for 500,000 disabled borrowers who qualify for automatic relief, and waive the complex requirements of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program so that more borrowers can obtain forgiveness.
The Biden administration has begun holding public hearings as part of a lengthy process to analyze and perhaps alter significant federal student loan programs such as Borrower Defense, TPD discharge, income-based repayment, and Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

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