54,900 student loan borrowers in PSLF will receive $4 billion in debt relief

• Biden announced $4.28 billion in student debt relief for 54,900 borrowers under Public Service Loan Forgiveness.
• The relief is a result of the Department of Education’s ongoing corrections to PSLF.
• President-elect Donald Trump is unlikely to continue Biden’s student debt relief efforts.

President Joe Biden announced additional student loan forgiveness with just a month until he leaves the White House.

On Friday, Biden and his Education Department announced they had approved $4.28 billion in student debt for 54,900 borrowers under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after 10 years of qualified payments.

The relief is the result of ongoing improvements to PSLF, including a waiver that expired in October 2022 that allowed payments that were previously ineligible for relief to count toward borrowers’ forgiveness progress.

“Four years ago, the Biden-Harris Administration promised America’s teachers, military personnel, nurses, first responders and other public servants that we would fix the broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and I am proud to say we have delivered “ Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

This latest relief brings total student loan forgiveness under Biden to approximately $180 billion for nearly 5 million Americans, including $78 billion for just over 1 million borrowers enrolled in PSLF.

It’s unclear whether the Biden administration will announce further student debt relief before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20. Still, it caps a tumultuous past few years for student loan borrowers hoping for comprehensive debt relief – Biden’s first student debt relief plan was struck down by the Supreme Court last summer, and his Plan B debt relief plan is now in court after a Republican-led ban States have challenged it in court.

Additionally, 8 million borrowers who enrolled in the SAVE plan — Biden’s new income-driven repayment plan designed to make monthly payments cheaper and shorten the time to forgiveness — are in limbo as they wait for a court to rule whether the plan can be implemented forward.

Even if Biden’s plans for broader relief survive their legal challenges, the Trump administration is unlikely to pursue those efforts. Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, previously told Business Insider that Biden “has taken the stance of, ‘We want to try to forgive as much debt as possible through various programs.'”

“And to put it mildly, we will not see this attitude again under the Trump administration,” Cooper said.

Trump proposed abolishing PSLF in his first term, but this would require congressional approval. Republican control of Congress and the White House means Trump will likely have more success in achieving his goals.

“From the first day of my administration, I promised to ensure that higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity,” Biden said in a statement. “Thanks to our actions, millions of people across the country now have the opportunity to start businesses, save for retirement and pursue life plans that they had to put on hold because of student loan debt.”