Throughout Joe Biden’s term as president, the White House made student loan debt relief a top domestic priority. Some of the Democratic administration’s efforts were more successful than others, but it was not for lack of effort: Biden would’ve done more, were it not for ferocious pushback from Republicans and Republican-appointed judges.
The results led to odd pushback from Donald Trump, who declared during the 2024 campaign season that the Democratic White House was “ALL TALK, AND NO ACTION” on the issue of student loan debt forgiveness. That didn’t make a whole lot of sense — Biden and his team took as many actions as they could under the law — but the then-candidate seemed eager to convince younger voters not to support the Democratic ticket because Republicans successfully derailed some of the Biden administration’s efforts.
A year later, Trump is back in the Oval Office, and the pendulum has swung wildly in the opposite direction. The Wall Street Journal reported that the incumbent president and his team are “starting to put millions of defaulted student-loan borrowers into collections Monday and threatening to confiscate their wages, tax refunds and federal benefits.”
There are some five million borrowers whose loans are in default, many of whom haven’t made regular payments since the pandemic. Millions more are on the cusp of default, according to the Education Department. Nearly 200,000 defaulted borrowers will begin receiving notices from the Treasury Department Monday notifying them that benefits and tax refunds could be withheld as soon as a month from now, an Education Department spokesperson said. Wage garnishment could begin later this summer, the spokesperson added.
Vox’s Patrick Reis had an excellent explainer on the recent history, noting that it was Trump who, as the Covid crisis wreaked havoc on the economy, initially halted requirements related to student loan repayments. A year later, Biden went far further, trying to wipe out the debts for millions of borrowers — right up until Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court balked.
Even after that ruling, however, student loan borrowers were able to avoid penalties for missed payments. Last month, as my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones noted, the Trump administration announced collections on loans that have not been paid would begin on May 5, and this week, that deadline arrived.
As for how many people will feel the effects, Vox explained, “Almost 43 million Americans have student debt. Five million borrowers haven’t made a payment in 360 days, per the Education Department. More than 20 percent of borrowers haven’t made a payment in at least 90 days, according to the credit service TransUnion.” The hardships for many are likely to be dramatic. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown recently concluded, “The Education Department is being systematically stripped of all the parts that help people’s lives in nonmonetary ways. Instead, all that’s likely to be left soon is an agency dedicated to clawing back money from those who borrowed it for their chance at the American Dream but are finding their reality of bills and expenses hard to afford.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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