The Biden administration is gearing up for a major test of the federal government’s bureaucracy: tens of millions of applications for student debt relief, the Wall Street Journal reported. Later this month, the administration will launch the largest student loan forgiveness program in U.S. history. The government and the servicers who manage the federal student loan portfolio will have less than three months to process the initial batch of applications and ensure balances are adjusted before Jan. 1, 2023, when borrowers are due to start making mandatory payments on their loans for the first time in nearly three years. Previous student loan programs have been marked by delays and confusion, such as a loan-forgiveness program for people with public-service jobs that the Biden administration overhauled last year, after the Education Department revealed that only 5,500 borrowers had seen their debt wiped clean since the creation of the program more than a decade ago. Administration officials and Democratic lawmakers acknowledged that a messy rollout of President Biden’s new federal loan-forgiveness program would be a political liability right before the November midterm elections.
