Biden Opens Applications for Student Debt Cancellation

The federal government on Monday began accepting applications for President Biden’s promised student debt cancellation of up to $20,000 per borrower.

Those who meet the program’s annual income limits — up to $125,000 per individual or $250,000 per household — can apply online at https://studentaid.gov/debt-relief/application.

“This is a game changer for millions of Americans,” Mr. Biden said on Monday afternoon.

The Education Department, which holds $1.6 trillion in student loan debt and will manage the cancellation process, quietly opened the application website for testing on Friday night. More than eight million people had already applied by Monday, Mr. Biden said. The form is available in English and Spanish, and is intended to work on desktop computers and mobile devices.

Mr. Biden announced in August that he would use executive action to cancel billions of dollars in federal student loan debt. Lawsuits seeking to block the action were then filed, most prominently by a group of six attorneys general from Republican-led states. A federal judge in Missouri heard arguments last week on their request for an injunction to prevent the government from carrying out the plan.

“Republican members of Congress and Republican governors are trying to do everything they can to deny this relief, even to their own constituents,” Mr. Biden said on Monday. “Their outrage is wrong, and it’s hypocritical.”

He pointed to the $2 trillion in tax cuts that Republicans passed during the Trump administration and the nearly $800 billion in forgivable small-business loans during the pandemic to argue that he is justified in canceling student debt.

Doug Peterson, Nebraska’s attorney general and one of those who have sued, said last month that Mr. Biden’s plan was “economically unwise and inherently unfair.”

The Education Department said in a court filing that it would not cancel any loans until Sunday at the earliest.

The initiative is projected to be one of the costliest programs in Mr. Biden’s agenda, with an estimated price tag of $400 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It estimated that 95 percent of the 37 million borrowers with direct loans owned by the government would meet the relief plan’s income criteria.

Since March 2020, federal student loan borrowers have been able to skip their payments. That pandemic pause is scheduled to end in January. Administration officials have said they plan to eliminate the debt of many applicants this month and next.

Applicants are eligible for $10,000 in debt relief, or $20,000 if they received Pell grants for low-income families. For tens of millions of people, that level of relief would eliminate their federal student loan debt. The government plans to accept applications until Dec. 31, 2023.

The form asks applicants to self-certify that they fall within the income limits. A small fraction will be asked to submit documents to verify their eligibility, according to administration officials.

The White House is concerned that the debt forgiveness program will attract fraud and scammers seeking to process applications for fees. Mr. Biden warned that his administration would crack down on such schemes and reminded borrowers that there was no cost to apply for loan forgiveness.

New government websites can be notoriously finicky, as Mr. Biden knows well from the rollout of the Affordable Care Act health insurance website in 2013. He said on Monday that his administration was working to make sure that the student debt relief portal remained up and running.

“We’re going to make sure the system continues to work as smoothly as possible so that we can deliver student loan relief for millions of Americans as quickly and as efficiently as possible,” Mr. Biden said.