Biden administration floats student loan relief for borrowers facing hardship

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has proposed another student debt relief plan for 8 million people who cannot repay their loans because of “financially devastating hardships,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Friday.

The proposal, which will almost certainly face legal challenges, builds on the administration’s strategy of finding new ways to reduce student loan debt after the Supreme Court last year rejected a far more ambitious, $400 billion plan for as many as 45 million borrowers.

Under the proposed regulation, the secretary of education would be authorized to cancel federal student loans in cases where the Education Department determined “a hardship is likely to impair the borrower’s ability to fully repay the loan or render the costs of continued collection of the loan unjustified.”

Such a hardship could include things such as surprise medical bills, burdensome child care or elder care costs, and financial losses from a natural disaster, the department said.

“For far too long, our broken student loan system has made it too hard for borrowers experiencing heartbreaking and financially devastating hardships to access relief, and it’s not right,” Cardona said in a statement.

While the Biden administration has approached student debt as a national economic problem for the country and tried to achieve major cancellation through a variety of targeted programs this year, legal challenges brought by Republican states have repeatedly succeeded in blocking the plans, arguing that they exceed the Education Department’s authority under the law.

If implemented, the provision offers two paths for loan forgiveness.

In one, the department could automatically cancel loans for borrowers it determined had at least an 80% chance of defaulting within the next two years, based on the department’s analysis of borrower data. That analysis would be based on 17 factors including household income, assets, total debt balances and federal student aid awards received.

In the other, borrowers would need to apply for their debt to be waived, documenting the cause of their hardship and submitting their financial information for “holistic assessment” by the department.

As with previous student debt plans this year, the policy will be subject to review and public comment after it is published in the Federal Register in the coming weeks.

But the proposal faces a highly uncertain future as challenges brought by Republican attorneys general this year have generally succeeded in blocking student debt plans brought about through that rule-making process.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company