This post was originally published on this site.
Two-hundred and twenty-seven advocacy, labor, and civil rights groups have signed onto a letter urging the Biden-Harris Administration to provide student loan debt relief.
The letter — asking the U.S. Department of Education to publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) toward providing relief to borrowers experiencing hardship — is a response to recent federal court injunctions blocking portions of the administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education Repayment Plan, known as SAVE.
It follows a May 2024 petition, signed by 22,337 borrowers and including nearly 5,000 individual borrower testimonials in support of the administration’s initial package of rules to provide relief to 30 million Americans with student debt.
The letter stated that “it is critical that the Department move swiftly and urgently to publish an NPRM on the hardship rules which will allow the Administration to deploy necessary relief to the millions of Americans whose economic mobility and financial stability are hindered by the student debt crisis.”
The court is asking people with student debt to pay the price for decades of government mismanagement and industry abuses across the student loan system, said Mike Pierce, the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, in a separate statement following last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Biden v. Nebraska that similarly blocked the administration’s efforts to provide student debt relief.
“It now also falls to President Biden to stand with student loan borrowers and use the full might of the federal government to answer their demand for justice and relief in the face of this lawless and shamefully political ruling,” said Pierce. “Borrowers cannot afford to wait any longer.”