Mike Blake/Reuters
- Biden's upcoming budget won't include his campaign promise of forgiving student debt, WaPo reports.
- Biden said he would support canceling $10,000 in debt per person, but none of his proposed spending has that provision.
- Democrats want Biden to go bigger and cancel $50,000 per person through executive action.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
When he was campaigning for president, President Joe Biden said he would support $10,000 in student debt cancelation per person. It looks like he's not planning on following through on that promise anytime soon.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that in Biden's upcoming budget proposal, many of the health care promises he made during his campaign, like cutting prescription drug costs, won't be included, per four people familiar with the matter. Another major promise – canceling $10,000 in student debt – also didn't make the cut.
The proposal will include more specifics than Biden's "skinny budget" released in April.
"The President's budget will focus on advancing the historic legislative agenda he's already put forward for this year," Rob Friedlander, spokesman for the White House budget office, told the Post. "The budget won't propose other new initiatives but will put together the full picture of how these proposals would advance economic growth and shared prosperity while also putting our country on a sound fiscal course."
Insider reported on April 7 that Biden has yet to follow through on two student-debt promises from his campaign: to cancel $10,000 in student debt per person, and to cancel student debt for undergraduates at public colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
In a speech on November 16, Biden said that student loans are holding borrowers up, and forgiving $10,000 in student debt "should be done immediately." His campaign website also said the president would work with Democrats to "authorize up to $10,000 in student debt relief per borrower" as part of COVID-19 relief, but the $1.9 trillion stimulus package he signed in March didn't include that.
Read more: Forgiving student loan debt is a no-brainer, and Biden could do it tomorrow if he wanted to
Neither did his $4 trillion infrastructure proposal.
And while he said he would support legislation brought to him to cancel $10,000 in student debt, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said in a press call last month that doing so is lengthy and expensive, and while she has legislation to do it, there's no reason Biden can't use executive action to provide the immediate relief he had promised.
Warren is one of the leading lawmakers calling on Biden to cancel $50,000 in student debt per borrower through executive action, and while Biden said he doesn't believe he has that authority, he has asked the Education Department and Justice Department to review his ability to do so.
So far, Biden's Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has taken three distinct steps to confront student debt: he canceled debt for about 72,000 borrowers defrauded by for-profit schools, he canceled debt for over 41,000 borrowers with disabilities, and most recently, he expanded the scope of the payment pause to 1.14 million borrowers with private loans.
But no information has been released from the administration on additional student debt cancelation measures.
"Cancelling $50,000 in federal student loan debt will help close the racial wealth gap, benefit the 40% of borrowers who do not have a college degree, and help stimulate the economy," Warren and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a February statement."It's time to act. We will keep fighting."
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