Last week, the Washington Post reported that President Biden recently pressed Jeff Zients, his chief of staff, on the issue of student debt cancellation, telling him “to make sure his team was making the relief as expansive as possible”.
That’s good news for tens of millions of borrowers. But expansive relief will not be delivered if the administration fails to learn the lessons from round one of the cancellation battle: speed and conviction matter.
When the supreme court struck down President Biden’s attempt to cancel student debt last summer, his administration got to work to make plans for future cancellation. Today, the window for cancellation is open once again. Biden’s Plan B has a fighting chance – but only if the president moves fast.
Last month the administration concluded a five-month-long regulatory process to hammer out the legal parameters for cancellation using the Higher Education Act – a different legal authority than Biden used the first time around. In the last session of this process, a session which was only undertaken thanks to pressure from activists and progressive elected officials, rulemakers cracked open a critical window for debt cancellation.
This session established “economic hardship” as grounds for cancellation. Once again, Biden’s Plan B has a fighting chance – but only if the president seizes the moment and walks through it.
Why is the new provision on economic hardship such a gamechanger? As we know all too well from our work in the debt abolition movement, the vast majority of student borrowers experience economic hardship, struggling to make basic living expenses. In fact, we consider student loans themselves to be an indicator of economic hardship, a kind of regressive and financially debilitating tax on anyone who isn’t wealthy enough to pay for tuition outright.
These new guidelines recognize this. They open space for Biden to deliver on promised relief. Our fear, however, is that the administration will move slowly and cautiously, and, by doing so, enable their Republican adversaries to slam the window shut and claim another victory.
Moving slowly – a result of prioritizing means-tested relief, rather than cancellation for all – was one of the reasons that Biden’s prior debt relief plan met a bad end. Consider how the Department of Education took 51 days to put their extremely simple application for relief online. Every day they delayed implementing relief bought time for billionaire-backed lawsuits to move through a court system stacked with conservative judges eager to make partisan rulings.
It has now been six months since Biden announced his Plan B and already too much time has been wasted on regulatory machinations that some experts argued weren’t even necessary to begin with. Looking ahead, cancellation must be issued in the boldest, fastest manner possible, to give people relief and to register the results in time for the upcoming elections.
If the administration decides, once again, to route cancellation through an application or to otherwise “target” relief, instead of universally applying it, we will find ourselves in a Groundhog Day scenario: waiting for the administration to ready their process to administer relief while further lawsuits are prepared by the conservative right’s battalion of highly paid lawyers.
Last summer, both of us helped launch a first-of-its kind online tool that helps borrowers create and send legal appeals for the Department of Education to cancel their debt. The Student Debt Release Tool builds from the Department of Education’s legal authority to cancel student debt as part of the Higher Education Act of 1965 – a tried and true authority that has been used many times to eliminate people’s federal loans. Within weeks of the launch of the Student Debt Release Tool, tens of thousands of borrowers submitted appeals, flooding the Department of Education, and rumored to have shut down the agency’s email servers at least once.
The information in the Release Tool clearly demonstrates how student debt creates hardship, and why cancellation is the urgent and just response. In these appeals, borrowers recount their brushes with homelessness and turns to sex work, their mounting medical bills, their children’s grumbling stomachs when the cupboards yet again fall empty, the anxiety and depression that ensues.
The Release Tool also shows that the Department of Education already has the information it needs to act, and should start doing so now.
Beyond a canned reply, however, borrowers have received no meaningful response to their appeals from the Department of Education, leading debtors to seek help elsewhere. Over the past three months, groups of student borrowers in New York, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia, Georgia, Indianapolis and Missouri have been virtually marching into their congressional representative’s offices – asking them to send letters to the Department of Education urging the secretary to use the powers vested in him by the Higher Education Act to cancel student debt without delay, or excessive administrative procedures that risk thwarting the actual delivery of relief.
Although President Biden insists that he is doing everything he can to cancel student debt, the tens of millions of debtors desperate for relief, and the tens of thousands of unanswered Release Tool appeals, suggest otherwise.
Since President Biden’s initial plan to cancel debt was announced, the stakes have only become higher. As part of debt ceiling negotiations, President Biden turned student loan payments back on, leading the interest on over $1.6tn of federal student loan debt to once again pile up. Although Biden has attempted to reform one of the most faulty income-driven repayment programs, too many borrowers have found their payments erroneously increasing, rather than the purported goal of lowering monthly bills.
And while the Biden administration proudly struts its efforts to cancel student debt on social media, in reality only 10% of eligible borrowers have received even partial relief. The majority are waiting, desperately, on a promise unfulfilled. A sense of being gaslit looms.
There is, of course, no way for Biden to wholly protect against bad-faith litigation or to avoid anti-democratic decrees issued by Trump-appointed judges. But the Biden administration should show it is willing to fight. Don’t tell voters you are doing everything you can on debt cancellation, President Biden. Show us.
Astra Taylor is a writer, organizer and documentary maker and a co-founder of the Debt Collective
Eleni Schirmer, a writer and postdoctoral fellow at the Concordia University Social Justice Centre in Montreal, is part of the Debt Collective
