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The White House announcement brings the total loan forgiveness
approved by the Biden-Harris administration to $136.6 billion
for more than 3.7 million Americans.
Nearly 44,000 of the borrowers approved for relief are those
with a decade of public service, with close to 30,000 are people
who have been repaying their loans for at least 20 years but
never got the relief through income-driven repayment plans.
Biden vowed to continue working to deliver student debt relief
to as many borrowers as possible in the wake of the Supreme
Court’s June 30 ruling blocking his plan to cancel hundreds of
billions of dollars in debt.
"I won’t back down from using every tool at our disposal to get
student loan borrowers the relief they need to reach their
dreams," he said in a statement.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the department was
moving "full speed ahead" with efforts to deliver even greater
debt relief for more borrowers and to help them get on a faster
track to loan forgiveness under a new SAVE repayment plan.
As of June 2023, approximately 43.4 million student loan
recipients had $1.63 trillion in outstanding loans, according to
the Federal Student Aid website. The figure represents an
increase of nearly $17 billion in the outstanding loan balance
and almost 600,000 in the number of student loan recipients
since last year, it said.
Progressive voters, who are part of the coalition that helped
elect Biden in 2020, long pressed the White House to address
student loan debt, and the issue remains high on the agenda of
younger voters, many of whom have concerns about Biden's foreign
policy on the war in Gaza and fault him for not achieving
greater debt forgiveness.
(Reporting by Anirudh Saligrama in Bengaluru; editing by
Christina Fincher and Aurora Ellis)
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