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President Joe Biden announced more student-loan forgiveness with one month left until he leaves the White House.
On Friday, Biden and his Education Department said they have approved $4.28 billion in student debt for 54,900 borrowers in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after 10 years of qualifying payments.
The relief is a result of ongoing improvements to PSLF, including a waiver that expired in October 2022 that allowed payments that previously did not qualify for relief to count toward borrowers' forgiveness progress.
"Four years ago, the Biden-Harris Administration made a pledge to America's teachers, service members, nurses, first responders, and other public servants that we would fix the broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and I'm proud to say that we delivered," Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.
This latest relief brings the total student-loan forgiveness under Biden to about $180 billion for nearly 5 million Americans, including $78 billion for just over 1 million borrowers enrolled in PSLF.
It's unclear if the Biden administration will announce more student-debt relief before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20. Still, it caps off a tumultuous past few years for student-loan borrowers hoping for broad debt relief — Biden's first student-loan forgiveness plan was struck down by the Supreme Court last summer, and his Plan B for debt relief is now in court following legal challenging from Republican-led states.
On top of that, 8 million borrowers enrolled in the SAVE plan — Biden's new income-driven repayment plan intended to make monthly payments cheaper with a shorter timeline to forgiveness — are in limbo as they wait for a court to decide if the plan can move forward.
Even if Biden's plans for broader relief do survive their legal challenges, it's unlikely Trump's administration would continue those efforts. Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, previously told Business Insider that Biden "has taken a stance of, 'We want to try and forgive as much debt as possible through various different programs.'"
"And to put it mildly, we're not going to see that same attitude under the Trump administration," Cooper said.
Trump proposed eliminating PSLF during his first term, but doing so requires congressional approval. Republican control of Congress and the White House means that Trump would likely have more success achieving his goals.
"From Day One of my Administration, I promised to make sure that higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity," Biden said in a statement. "Because of our actions, millions of people across the country now have the breathing room to start businesses, save for retirement, and pursue life plans they had to put on hold because of the burden of student loan debt."
