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The Education Department has approved another $500 million in loan-forgiveness requests from former ITT Technical Institute students who say they were swindled by the now-defunct chain of schools, as the Biden administration expands its use of debt-relief programs, the Wall Street Journal reported. The loans of 18,000 former students are being forgiven under a legal provision known as borrower defense to repayment, which allows students to have their debts erased if they prove they were defrauded by their schools. The group whose loans were addressed Wednesday said the for-profit ITT Tech provided deceptive information about their employment prospects and whether credits earned there would transfer to other schools. ITT Tech shut down in 2016, after the government banned it from enrolling new students receiving federal aid. The chain offered degrees in fields including criminal justice, computer drafting and nursing. The Education Department said it found that between 2005 and when ITT closed in 2016, the school made “repeated and significant misrepresentations” to students about their expected jobs and earnings after graduation, and lied from 2007 through much of 2014 about how other schools would view credits earned at ITT.

The Biden administration has raised an estimate of losses on the federal government’s student loan portfolio by $53 billion, reflecting lower repayment rates and pandemic-relief efforts, the Wall Street Journal reported. The new estimate—contained in the administration’s proposed budget for the fiscal year that begins in October—is based on updated data on how much money the nation’s 43 million student loan borrowers have sent to the government in recent years to repay their loans. A year ago, the federal budget projected that taxpayers would ultimately lose $15 billion on all outstanding student debt, which currently comes to $1.6 trillion. The administration’s proposed $6 trillion budget now projects long-term losses will reach $68 billion. Those estimates are still far smaller than losses projected in an internal analysis led by officials appointed by Betsy DeVos, who was education secretary under President Donald Trump, which showed that taxpayers ultimately would be on the hook for roughly two-thirds of the $1.6 trillion student debt portfolio. That analysis was based on different assumptions on how quickly borrowers’ incomes would rise, how many would default on their loans and how much debt would ultimately be forgiven through income-based repayment plans, which set monthly payments at a percentage of a borrower’s income and forgive balances after 20 to 25 years of payments. Regardless of how they are calculated, losses are mounting and would increase further if the Biden administration moves to forgive some borrowers’ student debt outright, as congressional Democratic leaders have urged him to do. Biden has said that he would support forgiving $10,000 in student debt for every borrower with a federal loan—which would wipe out about $377 billion in debt, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. He has urged Congress to pass a law to do so.

For millions of Americans, there’s an unwelcome side of the return to business-as-usual after the pandemic: They’ll have to start repaying their student loans again, Bloomberg News reported. More than 40 million holders of federal loans are due to start making monthly installments again on Oct. 1, when the freeze imposed as part of COVID-19 relief measures is due to run out. It covered payments worth about $7 billion a month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimated. Their resumption will eat a chunk out of household budgets, in a potential drag on the consumer recovery. Americans now owe about $1.7 trillion of student debt, more than twice the size of their credit-card liabilities. Politicians recognize it’s not sustainable. Yet for all the talk of loan forgiveness during last year’s election campaign — including from President Joe Biden, who promised to write off at least $10,000 per borrower — there’s been no progress toward shrinking the pile.

Many renters who missed rent payments during the pandemic are unable to access billions of dollars in federal rent aid that started flowing to states and cities five months ago, the Wall Street Journal reported. Local governments across the U.S. have struggled with how to distribute the money, and some have complained that their staffs are being deluged by a flood of aid requests. Numerous renters are being disqualified for failing to correctly complete their applications, local officials say. President Biden has yet to say if he will extend the eviction ban that was first put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention back in September 2020 and is set to expire on June 30. It has been extended before. f the ban expires before more of the $47 billion in aid reaches landlords and tenants, it will result in a surge in evictions the money was intended to prevent, housing advocates say. About 11 million tenants are considered at risk of eviction due to financial hardship, according to government figures. While the U.S. Treasury Department oversees the rent aid, local officials are responsible for distributing the money. They have some leeway in deciding how to distribute it and what tenants must do to qualify. Treasury last month recommended a series of changes to expedite payments and break the logjam. Those included loosening documentation requirements for renters, as well as allowing aid to be paid directly to renters instead of landlords.

The U.S. government’s nationwide prohibition on evictions can stay in effect, a federal appeals court ruled, Bloomberg News reported. A three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., said that the eviction moratorium instituted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can continue while the Biden administration appeals a lower-court ruling that overturned the ban last month. In that case, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled the CDC had exceeded its authority when it issued a broad moratorium on evictions across all rental properties. After the government appealed, Friedrich put a temporary stay on her order. In upholding the stay on Wednesday, the appeals court said the government had made a “strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits.” The moratorium, first enacted by President Donald Trump and extended by President Joe Biden, aims to prevent evictions amid a public health emergency that has seen millions of Americans lose their jobs and fall deep into debt. The Alabama Association of Realtors, which filed the suit challenging the moratorium, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

More than 11 million Americans are behind on their rent and many could be pushed from their homes when the national eviction ban expires in June, CNBC.com reported. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium, which has been in effect since September, will lift on June 30. Although the policy has been far from perfect at keeping renters housed, it’s reduced the normal number of eviction filings over the same time period by at least a half, according to Peter Hepburn, an assistant professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Newark and research fellow at The Eviction Lab. Experts say the number of evictions could skyrocket when the ban lifts. Around 15% of adult renters are not current on their housing payments, according to an analysis by The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The CDC’s eviction moratorium has faced numerous legal challenges and landlords have criticized the policy, saying they can’t afford to house people for free or shoulder the country’s massive rental arrears, which could be as high as $70 billion. Yet housing advocates say the ban is lifting at a terrible time for both property owners and tenants, with states still scrambling to distribute the $45 billion in rental assistance allocated by Congress to address the crisis. “We need to let this moratorium stay in place until we spend all this money,” said Mark Melton, a lawyer who has been representing tenants facing eviction pro bono in Dallas. “If you bail out the renter, that means you bailed out the landlord,” he said.