- Student-loan payments are set to resume in ten days.
- Education Sec. Miguel Cardona said borrowers will know of further relief "within the next week or so."
- For months, Democrats have been pushing Biden to extend the pause and cancel student debt.
Student-loan payments are resuming in ten days unless President Joe Biden announces further relief. His Education Secretary once again said a decision will come before then, but did not indicate what it will be.
On Sunday, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona appeared on NBC's Meet the Press and was asked whether another extension of the student-loan payment pause is coming, along with permanent relief like debt cancellation. Student-loan payments have been paused for over two years, but they are now set to resume after August 31 — just ten days away — if Biden fails to announce a further extension, leaving millions of federal borrowers in limbo with the inability to financially plan.
"From day one, we've been really focused on making sure we're protecting our students and our borrowers…" Cardona told Meet the Press. "We know August 31 is a date many people are waiting to hear something from. We've been talking daily about this and I can tell you the American people will hear within the next week or so what the Department of Education will be doing around that."
When pushed on whether borrowers can confirm the relief won't be "nothing," Cardona answered that he "doesn't have any news to announce today, but I will tell you that American people will hear directly from us because we recognize that this is an important issue across the country."
Last week, Cardona told CBS News that borrowers will know "soon" whether the payment pause will be extended, and in June, he told lawmakers that borrowers will receive "ample notice" on any chances to their debt balances, but with just over a week before payments are scheduled to resume, time is running out. As Insider previously reported, this is the closest millions of federal borrowers have ever been to restarting payments without an update from Biden, and the lack of guidance is putting both borrowers and the companies that service student loans in a bind.
Scott Buchanan, the executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance — a trade group that represents federal loan servicers — told CNN over the weekend that "waiting to see hypothetically what the government may or may not do is probably not a good personal financial decision."
"If we have all this confusion going into the resumption on September 1, talking to your servicer now to understand what repayment plans are available for you, getting into that repayment plan today, updating your contact information with the servicer so we can reach out... it's the most important thing that people can do," Buchanan said. "It's most important that you don't wait on the hopes that the government may or may not do something in the future."
But after pledging to approve student-loan forgiveness on the campaign trail, many Democratic lawmakers, borrowers, and advocates are expecting Biden to act on the issue. Biden is reportedly considering $10,000 in loan forgiveness for borrowers making under $150,000 a year, and while Republicans do not want to see broad relief happen at all, Democrats want him to deliver it.
At the end of July, 107 Democratic lawmakers wrote to Biden urging him to extend the payment pause, and beyond that, many have been urging him to go bigger than $10,000 on debt cancellation. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren continues to push for $50,000 in relief — an amount the president said in May he was not considering — and other, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, want the whole $1.7 trillion student debt crisis wiped out.
"In Congress, they're busy handing out enormous amounts of welfare to large corporations," Sanders wrote on Twitter over the weekend. "Well, I think now is the time to tell 45 million Americans that we're canceling all of their student debt."