The White House has had some 17 months to prepare for this eventuality yet it looks like they couldn’t be less prepared to actually fulfill the details of Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
The backlash has been swift and frequent with Democrats lining up ahead of Republicans to take a swing at the Biden administration for proposing what is essentially a wealth transfer from taxpayers to a segment of the population earning on the higher end of the income spectrum.
To that end, you’d think the Biden team would be better prepared to implement the plan since they’ve had so much time to prepare. After all, Biden was talking about $10,000 student loan forgiveness back on the campaign trail in 2020, this isn’t exactly a new policy idea.
Not so, says Axios, as the entire plan and program is in disarray and being helmed by a department that has neither the staffing nor capacity to handle it:
The implementation of President Biden’s widespread, income-targeted student loan forgiveness is shaping up to be a bureaucratic challenge for the Department of Education.
Why it matters: Millions of Americans are in limbo waiting for information on how to take action on student debt relief — the success of which relies largely on an agency juggling unprecedented changes, on top of other reforms.
The agency doesn’t have income data for most of the 43 million Americans eligible for forgiveness, meaning around 35 million people — including Pell Grant recipients — will have to attest that they makes less than $125,000 per year and apply for relief.
Was this plan ever designed for implementation? That question needs to be asked.
Every part of the plan has problems from income verification to providing borrowers a way to actually apply for the forgiveness itself:
How it’ll work: The approximately 8 million qualifying borrowers for whom the agency already has income information will get automatic debt relief.
For everyone else: The White House is asking them to sign up for updates from the Education Department to receive further info on how to apply.
But, but, but: Experts caution that the agency may not be equipped to accomplish such a massive undertaking.
“It’s an understaffed and overcommitted organization,” Charlie Eaton, a UC Merced associate professor of sociology and student loan expert, tells Axios.
Remember back to Biden’s vaccine mandate on businesses with 100 or more employees in the Fall of last year? That plan was designed to fail and designed to be struck down in court at some later date.
Despite that, it didn’t stop employers from being tasked with implementing the requirement and forcing vaccination on their workers for fear of being fined by the federal government.
Eventually, the Biden administration would lose in court and withdraw the plan but not before it had accomplished the desired goal of forcing millions to get the jab or risk losing their job.
The student loan plan has an eerily similar feeling now and it could wind up being struck down in court or mired in the bureaucracy long before it ever gets off the ground.
Is Biden playing a bait-and-switch on midterm voters by promising this kind of debt relief without being able to actually make good on it? It’s a brilliant political move if it wasn’t dishonest on the face.
It’s not that Biden doesn’t intend to offer student loan forgiveness, he may very well intend it. The question is whether he can legally do it and can implement it from a practical standpoint.
Only time will tell now if Biden can make good on the promise at a later date and that later date won’t come until after the midterm election.
In that sense, it’s perfect timing to toss out a plan, hold an election, and sort out the details later.
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