The Washington Examiner has reported that President Joe Biden is trying again to forgive student loan debt and will likely take the issue into the 2024 election despite losing in the United States Supreme Court once.
The report said that Biden's Department of Education announced Friday that it would try again to cancel some student loan debt through an "adjustment" to the agency's income-driven repayment plan that could cancel $39 billion of debt for 800,000 borrowers.
"Starting today, over 800,000 student loan borrowers who have been repaying their loans for 20 years or more will see $39 billion of their loans discharged because of steps my Administration took to fix failures of the past," Biden said of the initiative in a July 14 statement. "These borrowers will join the millions of people that my Administration has provided relief to over the past two years — resulting in over $116 billion in loan relief to over 3 million borrowers under my Administration."
On Tuesday, the DOE published a list broken down by state, showing the number and amounts of loan forgiveness borrowers could receive as part of the new program, which targets those who have qualified for 20-25 years of IDR payments, according to the agency.
"For far too long, borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that failed to keep accurate track of their progress towards forgiveness," U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in the release on Friday. "Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is taking another historic step to right these wrongs and announcing $39 billion in debt relief for another 804,000 borrowers.
"By fixing past administrative failures, we are ensuring everyone gets the forgiveness they deserve, just as we have done for public servants, students who were cheated by their colleges, and borrowers with permanent disabilities, including veterans. This Administration will not stop fighting to level the playing field in higher education."
The Supreme Court voted down Biden's last attempt to forgive some $430 billion in student debt 6-3 in June.
The high court held that only Congress would have the authority for such a massive debt cancellation and took issue with the Biden administration's use of the COVID-19 emergency as its legal basis for excusing the debt.
"All this leads us to conclude that 'the basic and consequential trade-offs' inherent in a mass debt cancellation program 'are ones that Congress would likely have intended for itself,'" Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
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