After Biden’s original extensive student loan forgiveness plan was struck down by the supreme court last July, the Biden administration announced Friday that in February, the Department of Education will erase the federal student loan debts of anyone who has been making monthly payments for at least 10 years and originally borrowed less than $12,000.
To be eligible for this wave of student loan forgiveness, borrowers must be enrolled in the Biden administration’s new Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan. In an effort to have this forgiveness plan reach as many people as possible, the Department of Education has launched an email campaign to eligible borrowers not yet enrolled in SAVE. This wave of repayments is meant to target low income borrowers who left college before obtaining a degree and never earned the wage benefits that come with a college degree.
In response to this plan and the fact that under SAVE, low income borrowers will pay an average of $6,121 for every $10,000 they borrowed, Republicans have voiced their displeasure. The chairwoman of the House Education Committee said that Biden is “greenlight[ing] the Department of Education to dump even more kerosene on an already raging student debt fire.” She went on to compare the people managing the Department of Education’s budget to “infants playing with abacuses,” emphasizing how she sees the plan as illogical and lacking financial considerations.
This student loan forgiveness plan relates to bureaucracy since the Department of Education is one of the cabinet departments and as with most of the federal bureaucracy, the Department is getting large-scale attention only when what they’re doing is perceived as negative. At the same time, this is an exception to that general precedent since many Democrats have been pushing for student loan forgiveness for years, so they would be giving the bureaucracy credit for something positive.
2 comments:
Overall, the student loan debt crisis is an incredible mess, but Biden has taken pretty good steps towards alleviating the crisis. Forgiving debt for those with initial loans of under 12k and have been saddled with loans for a long time makes sense. Forgiving all student loan debt would be misguided because it would just exacerbate wealth inequality (most borrowers are fairly wealthy and pay their loans back consistently and don't default).
I am kind of confused why loan forgiveness for long-time borrowers is necessary, though, given that Biden erased already 10k for all low-income borrowers a few years ago (https://www.nytimes.com/article/biden-student-loan-forgiveness.html).
This article is a great connection to what we are learning right now in class, about how many people (both citizens and higher-ups) are quick to criticize the actions of federal agencies in the bureaucracy. Erasing student debt has been an issue for a very long time, and I think the left has been pushing for quite a while to act on it. Yet when the Department of Education does do something about it, they get hate from the conservatives on the other side of the spectrum, who don’t want the federal government to step in at all. It’s a lose-lose either way, and it’s like when the bureaucracy is compared to a referee—when they do their job well, they receive little credit, but when they do things that irritate one side or the other, the opposition is very quick to throw shade at an agency. It’s imperative to understand that our government is never going to make both sides happy at the same time, but we can’t just sit around all day at a standstill hoping things will get better if we don’t do anything. At the very least, we have to keep fostering change and going with the flow, which is why I support Biden’s efforts at student loan forgiveness.
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