The Biden administration has a chance to deliver student debt relief. It must act

Last week, the Washington Post reported that President Biden recently pressed Jeff Zients, his chief of staff, on the issue of student debt cancellation, telling him “to make sure his team was making the relief as expansive as possible”.

That’s good news for tens of millions of borrowers. But expansive relief will not be delivered if the administration fails to learn the lessons from round one of the cancellation battle: speed and conviction matter.

When the supreme court struck down President Biden’s attempt to cancel student debt last summer, his administration got to work to make plans for future cancellation. Today, the window for cancellation is open once again. Biden’s Plan B has a fighting chance – but only if the president moves fast.

Last month the administration concluded a five-month long regulatory process to hammer out the legal parameters for cancellation using the Higher Education Act – a different legal authority than Biden used the first time around. In the last session of this process, a session which was only undertaken thanks to pressure from activists and progressive elected officials, rulemakers cracked open a critical window for debt cancellation.

This session established “economic hardship” as grounds for cancellation. Once again, Biden’s Plan B has a fighting chance – but only if the president seizes the moment and walks through it.

Why is the new provision on economic hardship such a game-changer? As we know all too well from our work in the debt abolition movement, the vast majority of student borrowers experience economic hardship, struggling to make basic living expenses. In fact, we consider student loans themselves to be an indicator of economic hardship, a kind of regressive and financially