As promised, the Biden-Harris regime thumbed their noses at the Supreme Court after its ruling against student loan forgiveness. The White House announced Friday that they went with a different plan.
According to CNBC:
The Biden administration announced Friday it would automatically forgive $39 billion in student debt for 804,000 borrowers. The relief is a result of fixes to the student loan system’s income-driven repayment plans. Under those repayment plans, borrowers get any remaining debt canceled by the government after they have made payments for 20 years or 25 years, depending on when they borrowed, and their loan and plan type.
In the past, payments that should have moved a borrower closer to being debt-free were not accounted for, according to the Biden administration.
“For far too long, borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that failed to keep accurate track of their progress towards forgiveness,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.
To bring people over the line for forgiveness, the Biden administration counted payments for borrowers who’d paused their payments in certain deferments and forbearances and those who’d made partial or late payments.
To put this into perspective, this new plan is a smaller version with tighter restrictions than the one struck down by the Supreme Court. The original plan would have stolen taxpayer money to pay off loans made by 37 million instead of 800,000.
According to The Gateway Pundit:
These 804,000 borrowers will be notified on Friday by the Department of Education and relief will begin 30 days later. Individuals who do not want debts discharged are encouraged contact their loan service providers.
This new plan is part of previous “fixes” to other programs the Regime believes were failing borrowers. ABC News notes that this includes $45 billion to people enrolled in Public Service Loan Forgiveness who weren’t getting the debt relief and $22 billion to borrowers who were defrauded by for-profit colleges.
The move by the Education Department is quite audacious considering the Supreme Court struck down Joe Biden’s lawless program to cancel debt relief back in June.
Despite the greatly reduced number of beneficiaries, this is still a major blow to common sense. It also sets the stage for further theft of taxpayer dollars using similar loopholes in the future.
Sound off about this development on my Substack.