WASHINGTON (AP) — A student loan cancellation program for public workers has granted relief to more than 1 million Americans — up from just 7,000 who were approved before it was updated by the Biden administration two years ago.
President Joe Biden announced the milestone on Thursday, saying his administration restored a promise to America’s teachers, firefighters, nurses and other public servants. He celebrated it even as his broader student loan plans remain halted by courts following legal challenges by Republican-led states.
“For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments,” Biden said in a statement. “We vowed to fix that, and because of actions from our administration, now over 1 million public service workers have gotten the relief they are entitled to under the law.”
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was created in 2007, promising college graduates that the remainder of their federal student loans would be zeroed out after 10 years working in government or nonprofit jobs. But starting in 2017, the vast majority of applicants were rejected because of complicated and little-known eligibility rules.
A 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office found that 99% of applicants were denied, often because they weren’t in the right loan repayment plan or because their payments had temporarily been paused through deferment or forbearance — periods that weren’t counted toward the 10 years of public work.
The GAO faulted the Education Department for failing to make the rules clear.
The program was the subject of legal and political battles, with Democrats in Congress calling on the Trump administration to loosen the rules and uphold the spirit of the program. Betsy DeVos, the education secretary at the time, countered that she was faithfully following the rules passed by Congress.
Declaring that the program was “broken,” the Biden administration in 2021 offered a temporary waiver allowing borrowers to get credit for past periods of deferment or forbearance, among other changes. A year later, the Education Department updated the rules to expand eligibility more permanently.
Since then, waves of borrowers have been approved for cancellation as they reach the 10-year finish line. On Thursday, 60,000 more hit the mark, pushing the total past 1 million. When Biden took office, just 7,000 borrowers had been granted relief over the previous four years.
In all, the program has erased $74 billion in loans for public workers.
“I want to send a message to college students across America that pursuing a career in public service is not only a noble calling but a reliable pathway to becoming debt-free within a decade,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.
After facing legal challenges to Biden's own student loan plans, his administration has increasingly shifted attention to the record sums of loan cancellation granted through existing programs.
In total, the administration says it has now canceled $175 billion for about 5 million borrowers. Public Service Loan Forgiveness accounts for the largest share of that relief, while others have had their loans canceled through income-driven payment plans and through a 1994 rule offering relief to students who were cheated by their schools.
Biden campaigned on a promise of widespread student loan cancellation, but last year the Supreme Court blocked his proposal to cancel up to $20,000 for 40 million Americans. Biden ordered his Education Department to try again using a different legal justification, but a judge in Missouri temporarily halted the plan after several Republican states challenged it.
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FILE - President Joe Biden speaks about student loan debt, April 8, 2024, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitch McConnell said after the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered," a “despicable human being" and a “narcissist,” according to excerpts from a new biography of the Senate Republican leader that will be released this month.
McConnell made the remarks in private as part of a series of personal oral histories that he made available to Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press. Tackett’s book, “The Price of Power,” draws from almost three decades of McConnell’s recorded diaries and from years of interviews with the normally reticent Republican.
The animosity between Trump and McConnell is well known — Trump once called McConnell " a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack." But the GOP leader’s private comments are by far his most brutal assessment of the former president and could be seized on by Democrats ahead of the election. The biography will be released Oct. 29, one week before the vote that will decide if Trump returns to the White House.
Despite those strong words, McConnell has endorsed Trump’s 2024 run, saying earlier this year “it should come as no surprise” that he would support the Republican party's nominee. He shook Trump’s hand in June when he visited GOP senators on Capitol Hill.
McConnell, 82, announced this year that he will step aside as GOP leader after the election but stay in the Senate through the end of his term in 2026.
The comments about Trump quoted in the book came in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump was then actively trying to overturn his defeat and McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs, costing him his Senate majority. Democrats ultimately won both races.
Publicly, McConnell had congratulated Joe Biden after the Electoral College certified the presidential vote and warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the results. But he did not say much else. Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.”
“And for a narcissist like him,” McConnell continued, “that's been really hard to take, and so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.”
Ahead of the Georgia runoffs, McConnell said Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”
Trump was also holding up a coronavirus aid package at the time, despite bipartisan support. “This despicable human being,” McConnell said in his oral history, “is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”
On Jan. 6, 2021, soon after he made those comments, McConnell was holed up in a secure location with other congressional leaders, calling Vice President Mike Pence and military officials for reinforcements as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Once the Senate resumed debate over the certification of Biden's victory, McConnell said in a speech on the floor that “this failed attempt to obstruct the Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our republic.”
He then went to his office to address his staff, some of whom had barricaded themselves in the office as rioters banged on their doors. He started to sob softly as he thanked them, Tackett writes.
“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” he told them.
The next month, McConnell gave his harshest public criticism of Trump on the Senate floor, saying he was “ practically and morally responsible ” for the Jan. 6 attack. Still, McConnell voted to acquit Trump after House Democrats impeached him for inciting the riot.
The GOP leader had doubts about Trump from the start. Just after Trump was elected in 2016, as Congress was certifying the election, McConnell told Biden, then the outgoing vice president, that he thought Trump could be trouble, Tackett writes.
The book channels McConnell’s inner thoughts during some of the biggest inflection points after Trump took office, as McConnell held his tongue and as the two men repeatedly fought and made up.
In 2017, as Trump publicly criticized McConnell for the Senate's failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump and McConnell had a heated argument on the phone. Weeks went by with no contact. Then Trump invited McConnell to the White House and called a joint press conference without telling him first. McConnell said the event went fine, and “it’s not hard to look more knowledgeable than Donald Trump at a press conference.”
After the passage of a $1.5 billion tax overhaul that same year, McConnell said, “All of a sudden, I’m Trump’s new best friend.”
He blamed Trump after House Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterm elections, Tackett writes. Trump ”has every characteristic you would not want a president to have,” he said in an oral history at the time, and was “not very smart, irascible, nasty.”
In 2022, as Trump continued to criticize him and made racist comments about his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, McConnell told Tackett that “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be criticized by than this sleazeball.”
“Every time he takes a shot at me, I think it's good for my reputation,” McConnell said.
Also in 2022, McConnell said in his oral history that Trump's behavior since losing the election had been “beyond erratic” as he continued to push false allegations of voter fraud. “Unfortunately, about half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says.”
By 2024, McConnell had again endorsed Trump. He felt he had to if he were to continue to play a role in shaping the nation’s agenda.
“It was the price he paid for power,” Tackett writes.
FILE - President Donald Trump brings Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., on stage during a campaign rally in Lexington, Ky., Nov. 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
