President Joe Biden said Friday that 22 million people have already registered for student loan relief.
“Folks, it takes lower than five minutes,” Biden said, speaking at Delaware State University, a historically Black college in Dover. “It’s about as easy to use while hanging out along with your friends at home or watching a movie. The overwhelming majority are applying on their phones. It is simple.”
The applying officially opened Monday but was released as a beta test Oct. 14. Biden said the White House took this path to avoid the technical glitches experienced when he and President Barack Obama rolled out the Inexpensive Care Act site.
Biden campaigned on a promise of student loan forgiveness. In August, he announced that federal student loan borrowers earning under $125,000 or households with lower than $250,000 in income can be eligible for as much as $10,000 in forgiveness. Pell Grant recipients are eligible for as much as $20,000 in debt relief.
“In total greater than 40 million Americans stand to learn from this relief,” Biden said. “For borrowers out of college, nearly 90% of relief goes to go to people making under $75,000 a yr. Let me be clear: Not a dime, not a dime will go to the highest incomes, period. It goes to individuals who really want it.”
Eligible borrowers owe greater than $1.7 trillion total, a number far greater than auto and bank card debt. Biden said he has already received over 10,000 letters from students thanking him for the chief order.
Some Republicans questioned the legality of the chief order, but court cases difficult the order were dismissed Thursday on each the state and federal level, allowing forgiveness to maneuver forward. Borrowers who submitted applications could possibly be granted forgiveness as soon as Sunday.
“They have been fighting us within the courts,” Biden said. “But just yesterday the state court and the Supreme Court said no, we’re on Biden’s side.”
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Thursday rejected a challenge to this system brought by a Wisconsin taxpayers group, and in Missouri a federal judge threw out a lawsuit brought by six Republican-led states. Lawyers for the federal government previously agreed to carry off on discharging student loan relief until Oct. 23, giving time for the legal challenges to proceed.
Speaking in Dover, Biden chided Republicans who supported $2 trillion in tax cuts under former President Donald Trump and personally received pandemic relief funds but who don’t support student debt relief.
“I don’t desire to listen to it from MAGA Republicans, officials who had lots of of hundreds of dollars of debt, even tens of millions of dollars in pandemic relief loans, forgiven, who now are attacking me for helping middle-class Americans,” Biden said.
He specifically called out Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. She and her husband received $180,000 value of Paycheck Protection Program loans, and the congresswoman criticized the coed loan plan.
