This newsletter is a weekly variation of POLITICO Pro's daily Education policy newsletter, Morning Education. POLITICO Pro is a policy intelligence platform that combines the news you require with tools you can use to act on the day's biggest stories. Act upon the news with POLITICO Pro. Go Here For the Details has been grappling for months over whether to accede to progressive needs to cancel big swaths federal trainee loan debt.
As the administration weighs those major choices, Education Department authorities have said they're focused on enhancing the existing financial obligation cancellation programs targeted at certain populations of debtors: those who have become severely handicapped or were defrauded by their college, and public service employees. A brand-new trove of federal data sheds some light on how the Biden administration is approaching financial obligation relief for these trainees: In 2007, Congress created a program indicated to erase federal student loan debt for customers who pay their loans for ten years while working in civil service.
What Trump did: The very first mate of customers became eligible for forgiveness throughout the Trump administration, which had already repeatedly proposed removing the program. The Education Department rejected the large bulk of the hundreds of thousands of debtors who obtained loan forgiveness. By roughly the end of the Trump period, roughly 6,000 borrowers had their trainee loans forgiven.
2020 and April 2021 the last months of the Trump administration and very first couple of months of the Biden administration. (It's impossible to identify specifically the number of customers looked for loan forgiveness and were declined during that time due to the fact that of the brand-new method the information is reported.)And the new data reveals a substantial documentation backlog at the Education Department; nearly 130,000 customers who got loan forgiveness or asked for an update on their development towards loan forgiveness were still waiting for responses at the end of April.