Biden administration under pressure to forgive student loans before Trump takes office

With less than two months left in office, President Joe Biden is under pressure to forgive more student loan debt.

On Wednesday, dozens of Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and Ed Markey, D-Mass., wrote a letter to U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, urging him to forgive the debt of borrowers who’ve applied for relief after being defrauded by their colleges.

Among its requests, the lawmakers asked the Education Department to process the pending borrower defense applications of an estimated 400,000 borrowers. (Borrowers can be eligible for that discharge if their schools suddenly closed or they were cheated by their colleges.)

“These borrowers completed an onerous application to demonstrate that they were victims of fraud, but the Department has yet to act,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter.

While Biden has been in office, the Education Department has forgiven more than $28 billion in student debt for more than 1.6 million borrowers who were misled by their schools or saw their colleges close.

More from Personal Finance:
Student loan borrowers may find bankruptcy harder under Trump
College enrollment falls 5% for 18-year-old freshmen
‘Dynamic pricing’ was a top contender for word of the year

But the lawmakers said that Education Department needed to act for the remaining borrowers before it is too late.

President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance are vocal critics of student loan forgiveness.

“Under the previous Trump Administration, borrowers’ applications were allowed to languish for years,” the lawmakers said in their letter. “If their application was reviewed, borrowers often were denied and granted no relief.”

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., echoed that message in a post on X on Monday.

“I’m on the Senate floor warning against predatory for-profit colleges and shining a light on borrower defense discharges through the Department of Education,” Durbin wrote. “We must continue to process these claims before the next administration comes into office.”

Trump himself once ran a for-profit school, called Trump University, in which attendees said they were duped with false advertising and high-pressure sales tactics. The school was open from 2005 to 2010. A federal court approved a $25 million settlement in 2018 with former Trump University students.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment .

Meanwhile, The Debt Collective, a union for debtors, launched its “Last 50 Days” campaign last month, to put pressure on the Biden administration to forgive the debt of student loan borrowers over the age of 50.

“Student debtors are going to get wrecked by the Trump administration, and that’s going to be the most painful for older Americans,” said Braxton Brewington, a spokesperson for the Debt Collective.

“The least Biden can do is help the borrowers who are quite literally running out of time, can’t wait for a more sympathetic administration in 2029,” Brewington said.

Biden has forgiven more student debt than any other president, touching nearly 5 million people. But his attempts to deliver wide-scale debt cancellation have all been stymied by Republican-led legal challenges.