About 25 million Americans who have student debt will soon receive emails from the Department of Education outlining how they can have some or all of their loans canceled later this year.
The emails signed by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona will give borrowers options for debt relief, ABC News reported.
The messages will be sent starting on Thursday, Forbes reported.
“Starting tomorrow, the U.S. Department of Education (Department) will begin emailing all borrowers with at least one outstanding federally held student loan to provide updates on potential student debt relief,” the department said in a statement, according to Forbes.
Most of the people who are targeted have been paying off their loans over the past 20 years or those with runaway interest. Runaway interest is when borrowers owe much more than what they initially took out because of increasing interest, ABC News reported.
The email will explain that they have a deadline to meet of Aug. 30 to tell their loan companies if they want to opt-out of the debt relief.
The alert does not necessarily mean the person will get some or any student loan relief, Forbes reported.
Cardona says in the email that the department “is in the process of finalizing who will be eligible for student debt relief, but we want to make you aware of this potential relief.”
The reason for the email, according to President Joe Biden, is to allow those who qualify to be prepared so they can “benefit swiftly once the rules are final.”
Republicans have filed lawsuits trying to stop student aid reform and debt relief.
Specifically, the SAVE Plan introduced by Biden was paused after Republicans said it overstepped Biden’s authority. He had tried to use an executive action, CNBC reported. The new plan is being rolled out through a regulatory process.
Biden’s administration is still trying to finalize who exactly will qualify after the Supreme Court overturned the first plan that forgave some or all of the debt owed by 43 million people.
Part of the potential plan is not to wipe out the entire loan, instead either reduce or cancel the interest, ABC News reported. The amount of interest forgiven would be income-based.
Already 4.8 million borrowers have had what they owed for their degrees wiped out by the administration.
The administration hopes to have the plan rolled out this fall, possibly weeks before November’s presidential election, CNBC reported.
“The Biden-Harris administration continues to dangle loan ‘forgiveness’ in front of millions of borrowers across the nation,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C. said in a statement to CNBC. “This is just another illegal scheme intended to buy votes in November.”
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