U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is touting efforts that he said will result in 18,050 Georgia borrowers receiving more than $1.5 billion in student loan relief.
Cardona on Tuesday provided updated numbers on how many Georgians have been approved since October 2021 for loan discharge through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. It allows eligible government and nonprofit workers, such as military veterans and nurses, to get their remaining loan balance forgiven after 10 years of qualifying payments.
Cardona released the data exclusively to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a phone interview Tuesday.
His update comes as the U.S. Supreme Court decides the fate of the Biden administration’s much larger relief plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt for eligible borrowers. The court is expected to rule by June on two cases challenging Biden’s proposal. In Georgia, about just over one million people applied or were automatically eligible for relief under that plan before the legal battle halted the program.
“We are anxiously awaiting the results” of the court cases, Cardona said.
In the meantime, he said, the administration is proud of its work with the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
“We’re making public service something that we want to be desirable again,” Cardona said. “We’re doing our part to try to make sure that we’re reinforcing that, rewarding that.”
Congress created the public service program in 2007. But Cardona said it was underutilized, with only 7,000 applications processed nationwide from 2017, when applications were first accepted, to 2021.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration issued temporary waivers that allowed borrowers to count payments from all federal loan programs or repayment plans toward forgiveness, that expired Oct. 31. That widened the net of who could qualify, in addition to permanent rule changes, Cardona said.
About 453,000 borrowers nationally, including 18,050 Georgians, are among those approved for nearly $31 billion in loan forgiveness through the public service program.
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