He questioned publicly whether he had the authority to do it, and he ruled out emphatically the $50,000 amount of loan forgiveness many progressives aggressively were pushing. And in many ways, it grew to echo the governing style that has defined Biden’s tenure in elected office: deliberativeness that can frustrate those around him, a policy platform that seeks consensus, but a late-lean toward progressivism that ends up surprising his liberal critics.īiden entered the presidency deeply skeptical of the idea of writing off large chunks of student loan debt. The process by which the president came to this policy was contentious and often confusing, filled with high stakes negotiations, pleas from outside stakeholders, internal disagreements, and last-ditch lobbying efforts from key Democratic lawmakers. 31, 2022, after which Biden vowed he would require borrowers to resume paying their loans. It will also extend the moratorium a final time, until Dec. The plan will deliver hundreds of billions of dollars of relief to tens of millions of borrowers and transform the federal government’s student loan program. On Wednesday, Biden finally signed off on his highly anticipated student loan assistance package.
An explosive December meeting with outside activists ensued and a last-ditch reprieve was formalized, in which the moratorium was extended. But at one point last fall, officials began to prepare seriously for resuming payments for tens of millions of Americans and they were prepared to do so without any decision on canceling debt, people familiar with the discussions said. His administration had been routinely extending a moratorium on student loan payments put in place at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. And White House officials at some point last year told the team handling that correspondence to simply stop selecting so many letters for Biden to review because he hadn’t made up his mind on the issue, according to a person briefed on the interaction.Īs the president kept putting off a decision on canceling student loans, however, the prospect of restarting loans for millions of Americans continued to come to a head. Student loans were regularly in the top five issues in the correspondence that the White House received from Americans each week, according to a person familiar with an internal report. And as the debate over what to do lingered, aides began to take steps to try and manage internal deliberations. For months after he had entered office, President Joe Biden had punted on his campaign promise of forgiving up to $10,000 in student loans.
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