More than 800,000 student loan borrowers should be looking at their emails as President Joe Biden is sending out letters explaining that their loans have been erased.
The White House on Tuesday announced that about 813,000 borrowers who had their accounts adjusted in August will be getting an email from Biden explaining that their loans had been forgiven due to the Education Department’s one-time account adjustment.
The plan under which the debt of the 800,000 was erased was announced by Biden in July. It is intended to adjust the way the Education Department calculates certain student loan payments. The adjustments are being made, the department said, to correct past errors in counting payments and the result would show that borrowers made payments that were not counted correctly toward their debt.
The income-driven plan promised the forgiveness of certain loans after 20 or 25 years of payments.
“Congratulations — your student loan has been forgiven because of actions my Administration took to make sure you receive the relief you earned and deserve,” the email from Biden reads.
“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 email said. “I vowed to fix that, and I’m proud that my Administration has delivered on that promise.”
The email comes months after borrowers resumed federal payments after the pandemic pause.
The U.S. Supreme Court in June rejected Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, which would have canceled as much as $20,000 in student loan debt for individual borrowers. The price tag for the program totaled $430 billion.
Biden’s administration has forgiven $127 billion in student loan debt for nearly 3.6 million borrowers to date.
