Silver State Times

House Budget Committee Republican Leader Jason Smith criticized President Joe Biden's recent student debt forgiveness plan, noting that the burden now falls on American taxpayers.

Smith said that Biden's student loan waiver will end up costing American taxpayers an estimated $3 billion.

"President Biden continues to pursue a permanent pandemic narrative at a tremendous cost to American taxpayers," Smith said recently. "Today, President Biden added billions more to the taxpayer's tab by canceling the student loan debts of thousands of borrowers and rewriting repayment contracts for millions more with the swipe of a pen. This comes soon after the president extended a blanket student loan payment moratorium that is costing taxpayers $4.3 billion every month, and further fueling the inflation fire raging across our country. Democrats have made it clear that their goal is total forgiveness of all federal student loans — a gross attack on hardworking Americans who would have to foot the bill for a $1.6 trillion bailout to the wealthiest twenty percent of American households — those with graduate degrees, six-figure incomes, and high lifetime earnings.”

The U.S. Department of Education eliminated the student loan debt of approximately 40,000 Americans under the Biden administration's Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, a recent Reuters report said. Additionally, thousands of other Americans will get income-driven repayment (IDR) forgiveness, and approximately 3.6 million borrowers will get a minimum of three years of extra credit toward IDR expenses.

Biden has forgiven more student loan debt than any of his presidential predecessors, with approximately $20 billion forgiven since he took office, a Monday report from Fortune said. Still, that amount accounts for only 1% of all federal student loan debt, which currently totals $1.7 trillion among 45 million borrowers.

A News Nation Now report this week expects congressional Democrats to keep pressuring the president to forgive approximately $50,000 per student, despite his campaign promise of only $10,000 forgiveness per student—which he has also yet to keep.

Earlier this month, the administration announced they were prolonging the student loan repayment pause until the end of August in order to alleviate some of the financial burdens Americans are having as they emerge from the pandemic, a recent White House release said

While President Biden has forgiven over $100 billion in student debt, the measures have yet to obtain congressional approval, the Wall Street Journal reported recently. The Journal's editorial board opined that progressives will not be happy unless the president forgives all federal student debt.

A recent report from the Education Data Initiative showed that $11.8 billion in student loan debt belongs to people living in Nevada. The 349,700 student borrowers residing in the state equates to approximately 11.3% of Nevada's total population.