White House officials are currently planning to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower, after months of internal deliberations over how to structure loan forgiveness for tens of millions of Americans, the Washington Post reported. President Biden had hoped to make the announcement as soon as this weekend at the University of Delaware commencement, the people said, but that timing has changed after the massacre Tuesday in Texas. The White House’s latest plans called for limiting debt forgiveness to Americans who earned less than $150,000 in the previous year, or less than $300,000 for married couples filing jointly. It was unclear whether the administration will simultaneously require interest and payments to resume at the end of August, when the current pause is scheduled to lapse. The White House said no final determination has been made about the matter. Wiping out $10,000 of debt per borrower could cost roughly $230 billion, according to estimates by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank. However, restarting payments for borrowers, which have been on hold since March 2020, would bring additional money into federal coffers. The think tank said in March that pausing payments had cost the federal government $100 billion and would run around $50 billion per year to maintain. The Washington Post had previously reported that the administration was considering making only undergraduate debt eligible for forgiveness.
