On Friday, the Biden administration took a significant step forward in its latest attempt to cancel a large swath of student debt, following a major setback when the Supreme Court blocked its initial debt-forgiveness plan.
After the Supreme Court knocked down his plan to cancel student debt en masse, President Joe Biden said he would take another stab at student-loan forgiveness. Part of this so-called Plan B, is a regulatory process called negotiated rulemaking. For years, borrower advocates have been pointing to the experiences of people in these groups as indicators of the flaws in the way the government approaches college financing and student-loan collection. That the Biden administration highlighted them in this paper signals that officials are “grappling with the brokenness of the student loan system,” Yu said.
Both Biden and administration officials have said they’re focused on delivering debt cancellation to as many people as possible as quickly as possible. On a conference call with reporters, Zayn Siddique, deputy assistant to the President and deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said it wouldn’t be fair to read the issue paper as narrowing the conversation around student debt relief from what Biden originally proposed.