Biden Administration Extends Student-Loan Repayment Moratorium for the Fourth Time

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced it would extend a pause on student-loan repayments through the end of August.

The administration had previously extended the moratorium three times and the current iteration was set to expire on May 1. The Trump administration extended the moratorium twice after enacting it on March 13, 2020, when the pandemic began.

Biden said in a statement Wednesday that the U.S. is “still recovering” from the fallout of the pandemic.

“If loan payments were to resume on schedule in May, analysis of recent data from the Federal Reserve suggests that millions of student loan borrowers would face significant economic hardship, and delinquencies and defaults could threaten Americans’ financial stability,” Biden said.

Congressional Democrats have called on Biden to cancel student debt altogether through executive action, a route that would likely be challenged as unconstitutional.

“I think some folks read these extensions as savvy politics, but I don’t think those folks understand the panic and disorder it causes people to get so close to these deadlines just to extend the uncertainty,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) said in a Twitter post in reaction to news of the extension. “It doesn’t have the affect [sic] people think it does. We should cancel them.”

Biden called for Congress to pass legislation canceling at least $10,000 in student debt per borrower during his 2020 presidential campaign. However, the president has not attempted to broadly cancel student debt via executive action.

“The president is going to look at what we should do on student debt before the pause expires or he’ll extend the pause,” White House chief-of-staff Ron Klain said on the Pod Save America podcast last month. “Joe Biden, right now, is the only president in history where no one’s paid on their student loans for the entirety of his presidency.”