The administration has canceled $127 billion in student debt with hopes to expand those efforts via regulation.
The first of roughly 813,000 student loan borrowers will be notified via email on Nov. 28 that their federal loans were forgiven, the White House has announced.
The email, shared ahead of time with The Epoch Times, includes a message for borrowers from President Joe Biden congratulating them on their debt forgiveness and urging them to share their stories of “what this relief means” to them.
“For too long, the student loan program failed to live up to its commitments – and millions like you never got the relief you were owed because of errors and administrative failures,” the missive reads. “I vowed to fix that, and I’m proud that my Administration has delivered on that promise.”
More than 614,000 of the borrowers set to receive the email will have their remaining federal student loan debt entirely wiped out.
The White House first announced the mass debt cancelation—totaling more than $39 billion—in July, noting that hundreds of thousands of borrowers had been denied forgiveness they were entitled to due to “errors and administrative failures.”
Those errors, according to the administration, included the failure to give borrowers proper credit for decades of payments under their income-driven repayment plans and loan servicers’ wrongful placement of certain borrowers in forbearance.
The move came on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down President Biden’s controversial student debt forgiveness plan, which the Congressional Budget Office had said could cost upwards of $400 billion.
Since then, the Biden administration has sought other ways to deliver on its promise of student loan debt relief.
One method that was settled on is through the recently launched Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan, under which monthly payments will be calculated based on a borrower’s income and family size rather than their loan balance. The plan also ensures that loan balances won’t increase due to unpaid interest—as long as monthly payments are made—and that remaining balances are forgiven after a certain number of years.
