More than 800,000 people will soon be able to get rid of their student loans

More than 804,000 people who took out government student loans are in for a nice treat.

President Biden tried to get the Supreme Court to forgive a lot of people’s debts, but the court turned him down. These borrowers will soon get an email from the U.S. Department of Education telling them that their debts will soon be automatically canceled.

The Biden administration promised this last year in response to years of complaints, lawsuits, and an NPR investigation that found that many long-time borrowers who should have qualified for loan forgiveness under the rules of the government’s income-driven repayment plans (IDR) hadn’t gotten it because of bad management by the department and loan servicers.

In a press statement on Friday, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said, “For far too long, borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that didn’t keep accurate track of their progress toward forgiveness.”

The move will get rid of government student loan debt worth $39 billion.

Borrowers, activists, and writers have been warning about these IDR mistakes for years.

IDR rules have said for a long time that a borrower’s loan amount will be cancelled after 20 years of payments. However, a March 2021 study by supporters for borrowers found that at that time, 4.4 million borrowers had been paying back their loans for at least 20 years, but only 32 had their debts erased under IDR.

Why? One big problem: These IDR plans, which were meant to be a safety net for people with low incomes, were hard to sign up for. So, loan service companies often put people who are having trouble paying their loans into long-term forbearance, which is easier for call center workers to explain over the phone. Forbearance may give you a small break from making payments, but interest keeps adding up.

In April 2022, an NPR investigation based on unreleased Education Department documents found more problems with the way the department handled these IDR plans. For example, the department knew that several loan servicing companies weren’t actually keeping track of borrowers’ progress toward loan forgiveness, and borrowers’ payment histories were often damaged and incomplete when they were moved from one servicer to another, which is a common practice.

In response, the Biden administration promised last spring to do a one-time “account adjustment” for federal student loan borrowers, giving them extra credit toward loan repayment for months spent in long-term deferment. Even borrowers who were never in an IDR plan are getting or will soon get retroactive credit toward loan forgiveness, “regardless of whether payments were partial or late, the type of loan, or the repayment plan,” according to a release from the department.

This wide-ranging look at loan accounts isn’t over yet, and it will go on until 2024.

Friday’s $39 billion adds a lot of weight to the Biden administration’s previous debt relief efforts, which now add up to at least $116 billion. It also shows how the Education Department can help vulnerable borrowers even after the Supreme Court recently told it to stop.