On October 4, three days after federal student loan payments resumed for 44 million people in the US, President Joe Biden canceled USD 9 million, just 0.5% of the USD 1.6 trillion total federal student debt owed. Biden’s additional debt relief affected 125,000 student loan borrowers. In response, the Debt Collective, the United States’ “first debtors’ union,” wrote, “this is a tiny amount. He can cancel as much as he wants and he’s choosing nickels and dimes.”
Student loan payments resumed on October 1 following a series of failures by the Biden administration and Democrats to enact significant debt relief. In August of 2022, Biden launched a student loan debt relief program that would have zeroed out the debts of 20 million people. However, conservatives led legal challenges against the program that immediately halted it before anyone’s debt could be forgiven. The case against the program was taken up all the way to the conservative Supreme Court, which struck down the measure in June.
Also in June, lawmakers from both parties pushed through a bipartisan debt ceiling deal, which contained many attacks against the working class, including codifying an end to the student debt payments pause instituted by Trump during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Organizations such as the Debt Collective argue that Biden actually has the legal power to cancel all USD 1.6 trillion in federal student. “The Department of Education has the power to cancel all of our federal student loans immediately through the Higher Education Act of 1965,” the union writes. The union is organizing borrowers across the country to petition the Department of Education to cancel their student loan debt.
