Biden Sends Emails to 813,000 Borrowers Celebrating Student Loan Forgiveness

The administration has canceled $127 billion in student debt with hopes to expand those efforts via regulation.

President Joe Biden is joined by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona as he announces new actions to protect borrowers after the Supreme Court struck down his student loan forgiveness plan in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on June 30, 2023. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The first of roughly 813,000 student loan borrowers will be notified via email on Nov. 28 that their federal loans were forgiven, the White House has announced.

The email, shared ahead of time with The Epoch Times, includes a message for borrowers from President Joe Biden congratulating them on their debt forgiveness and urging them to share their stories of “what this relief means” to them.

“For too long, the student loan program failed to live up to its commitments – and millions like you never got the relief you were owed because of errors and administrative failures,” the missive reads. “I vowed to fix that, and I’m proud that my Administration has delivered on that promise.”

More than 614,000 of the borrowers set to receive the email will have their remaining federal student loan debt entirely wiped out.

The White House first announced the mass debt cancelation—totaling more than $39 billion—in July, noting that hundreds of thousands of borrowers had been denied forgiveness they were entitled to due to “errors and administrative failures.”

Those errors, according to the administration, included the failure to give borrowers proper credit for decades of payments under their income-driven repayment plans and loan servicers’ wrongful placement of certain borrowers in forbearance.

The move came on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down President Biden’s controversial student debt forgiveness plan, which the Congressional Budget Office had said could cost upwards of $400 billion.

Since then, the Biden administration has sought other ways to deliver on its promise of student loan debt relief.

One method that was settled on is through the recently launched Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan, under which monthly payments will be calculated based on a borrower’s income and family size rather than their loan balance. The plan also ensures that loan balances won’t increase due to unpaid interest—as long as monthly payments are made—and that remaining balances are forgiven after a certain number of years.

Earlier this month, the Department of Education revealed that close to 5.5 million borrowers had already enrolled in the plan.

“Under President Biden, the Department created the SAVE Plan so that young people and working families can climb the economic ladder without unaffordable student loan debt weighing them down,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

“I’m thrilled to see that in less than three months, nearly 5.5 million Americans in every community across the country are taking advantage of the SAVE Plan’s many benefits, from lower monthly payments to protection from runaway student loan interest.”

Meanwhile, the administration has also forgiven the student loan debt of 662,000 government and nonprofit workers under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program; 491,000 borrowers with total and permanent disabilities; and nearly 1.3 million borrowers who were cheated by their schools, saw their institutions precipitously close, or were covered under related court settlements.

In all, the administration has approved $127 billion in debt cancelation for nearly 3.6 million borrowers.

Another Way

In addition to those moves, the president has said he still hopes to find an alternative route to providing widespread student debt relief through negotiated rulemaking under the Higher Education Act.

The law, passed in 1965, outlines the education secretary’s powers in relation to the modification, waiver, release, or compromise of federal student loans.

Detractors of that plan, however, say that the executive branch does not possess the authority to make such sweeping changes via regulations.

During the public comment portion of the negotiating committee’s Nov. 6 meeting, Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom Director Neal McCluskey made that very argument.

“All of this is occurring through a bureaucratic process that is grossly undemocratic and a violation of constitutional separation of powers,” he contended. “It is the Legislative Branch, not the Executive, that is charged with writing laws, including the major components of federal programs.”

Mr. McCluskey also expressed disappointment that the committee’s makeup offered no representation for most Americans who have never had federal student loan debt.

“People who attend college are poised to be major economic winners,” he noted. “They should pay the cost of investing in themselves, not taxpayers. They should also bear the risk of an overly expensive or poorly scrutinized investment—that incentivizes thoughtful, efficient education.”

Holding that mass debt cancelation would only incentivize institutions to further drive up the cost of tuition, he contended that the committee’s efforts would only end up hurting those they seek to help.

The committee is set to meet again on Dec. 11-12.