We won’t be talking student loan relief once Trump takes office. We’ll be talking about the abolition of the Department of Education.
As we race toward an authoritarian iceberg clearly aimed at crushing vital government programs and agencies, Biden has a choice: He can act swiftly to save lives or wring his hands and abandon the people he pledged to serve. The more student debt Biden cancels in the coming months, the more lives he will save, plucking them from the harm and chaos Trump and his allies have promised. The Trump administration has shown us who they are and what they intend to do. We believe them. But for the next 50 days, Joe Biden is still the president. As such, he still has great responsibility on his hands, and a singular choice: To do everything he can to save lives, or to concede to the cowardice of false powerlessness.
Many of the workers risking their lives amid the pandemic are burdened with student debt. We owe them more than just applause
Every day at 7pm, New Yorkers have cheered, applauded and banged pots and pans for frontline workers. One of those they have cheered for is Shana-Kay Henry, a physician assistant in the city, who, like thousands of others, is praised as a hero for her brave caretaking efforts during the pandemic.
In her case, Henry worked as an ER physician assistant, caring for Covid-19 patients. What the applauding masses may not know about her and many others like her, though, is her other affliction: student debt.
Henry owes $223,000 for her education, including a master’s degree from Touro College School of Health Sciences, amassed in pursuit of her dream of a medical career and of becoming a “mentor and advocate for women’s health”.
Due to her outstanding student loans, Henry cannot afford to purchase a home and currently resides with one of her parents. She spends roughly 30% of her salary on her student loan payments, forcing her to work even longer hours.
This makes her “exhausted and on my days off all I want to do is rest”, says Henry. It also gives her “So much anxiety and fear that I will be trapped with the burden of student debt for a lifetime.”
Today, many Americans laud the valiance of first responders. (We define first responders to include everyone from physician assistants, like Henry, to the postal workers delivering our mail.) But after the applause, we should take care of the load we can actually help with – their student debt. We can help them pay for it.
The answer is simple: student loan forgiveness. Some Democrats have recognized the double sacrifice of frontline workers in particular—they are simultaneously risking their health and yet still in debt. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has recently created a proposal to offer these workers free education. But not loan cancellation.
The former vice-president and 2020 presidential hopeful backed a 2005 bill that stripped students of bankruptcy protections and left millions in financial stress
“ ... Among his promises is that he will fix the student loan crisis saddling 45 million Americans with crippling debt now totalling a staggering $1.5tn. One idea is to allow people struggling to repay private student loans owed to banks and credit card companies to discharge them in bankruptcy.
The pledge is one of the most striking policies on offer from Democratic candidates in the 2020 race, given how the problem Biden now proposes to resolve came about in the first place. Private student loans were largely stripped of bankruptcy protections in 2005 in a congressional move that had the devastating impact of tripling such debt over a decade and locking in millions of Americans to years of grueling repayments.
The Republican-led bill tightened the bankruptcy code, unleashing a huge giveaway to lenders at the expense of indebted student borrowers. At the time it faced vociferous opposition from 25 Democrats in the US Senate.
But it passed anyway, with 18 Democratic senators breaking ranks and casting their vote in favor of the bill. Of those 18, one politician stood out as an especially enthusiastic champion of the credit companies who, as it happens, had given him hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions – Joe Biden. ...”
loooooooool if you're like me and got no correspondence about this:
On October 30th, 2025 The U.S. Department of Education published its final PSLF program regulations (student loan repayment plan) that will be effective on July 1, 2026.
It is a new version of the public service loan program, and you may qualify if you work for the gov or a nonprofit.
lol
To qualify for PSLF, you must
be employed by a U.S. federal, state, local, or tribal government or qualifying not-for-profit organization (federal service includes U.S. military service);
work full-time for that agency or organization;
have Direct Loans (or consolidate other federal student loans into a Direct Loan);
repay your loans under an income-driven repayment plan or a 10-year Standard Repayment Plan; and
make a total of 120 qualifying monthly payments that need not be consecutive.
Conservatives cooked up an absurd case because they know the Biden administration is fully able to cancel debt
The weapons of the scoundrel are destructive; he hatches plots to destroy the poor with lies, even when the plea of the needy is just. Isaiah 32:7 (BSB)
