The Biden administration is on the verge of providing $10,000 in loan forgiveness for student borrowers, recent reports claim.
According to the Washington Post, an upcoming White House measure would limit student loan forgiveness to Americans making less than $150,000 a year or $300,000 for couples filing jointly.
According to the guidelines, it would make 97 percent of the country’s over 40 million student borrowers eligible for loan relief.
Three White House officials, who spoke to the Washington Post on condition of anonymity, said the plans haven’t been finalized and cautioned that there may be some final tweaks before the plan is made public.
President Joe Biden had hoped to announce the initiative at his commencement speech at the University of Delaware last weekend but decided to postpone it in the aftermath of the Texas school massacre.
‘We Can Do Better’
The plan has been criticized on both sides of the aisle. Republicans have slammed the idea, saying a broad student relief measure would benefit high-income groups while providing no major relief to middle-and-low-income income earners.
Democrats, however, have urged Biden to go much further and raise the limit to $50,000 per borrower — a proposal the White House has balked at.
“$10k means tested forgiveness is just enough to anger the people against it *and* the people who need forgiveness the most,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response to the report. “$10k relieves most of the people who owe the least. What relief is there for the most desperate? For them, interest will undo that 10k fast. We can do better.”
The measure seems to have been formulated to turn around Biden’s falling approval ratings months before millions of Americans cast their votes for the fall midterms.