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The U.S. Department of Education has approved $42 billion dollars in student loan forgiveness for more than 615,000 public service workers since October 2021, the agency said Monday, touting what it described as Biden administration changes to encourage wider use of a particular debt cancellation program.
Amid legal challenges and sharp GOP criticism over President Joe Biden’s broader push to forgive $400 billion in federal student loans — with up to $20,000 canceled for each borrower — the government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program is increasingly being advertised as a secondary option, along with income-driven repayment plans, that the White House is trying to make more accessible.
The PSLF program was first congressionally authorized in 2007 to cancel student debt for government employees (like educators, firefighters, police officers, those in the military) as well as not-for-profit employees and others providing public services who make at least 10 years of payments on their loans.
However, the original PSLF program was « poorly implemented » and many borrowers weren’t successfully able to receive forgiveness, according to U.S. Education Undersecretary James Kvaal.
Kvaal that some public servants had the « wrong type » of loans or were using ineligible repayment plans, like bank-based loans made with federal subsidies.
For years, Kvaal said, student loan borrowers were making payments under PSLF, thinking they were getting closer to debt cancellation, to no avail.
« When Secretary [Miguel] Cardona got here, he found that only 7,000 people had ever gotten forgiveness in the history of the program. And in many cases, that’s because of the fine print in the program, » Kvaal said.
In October 2021, for one year, the Biden administration issued what it called a limited waiver temporarily changing the rules of PSLF.
