Joe Biden extends pause on student loan repayments again through August

Amidst calls to forgive student loans in their entirety, US President Joe Biden has ordered another pause on student loan repayments. The new extension would halt loan repayments until August.

Biden is set to pause student loan repayments again, and the pause would extend through August, a federal official told the Associated Press. This would mark the seventh extension on the moratorium of student loan repayments since taking effect back in March of 2020. The Education Department said the moratorium would save millions of borrowers about $5 billion a month.

Despite the seventh extension of the pause, some have expressed frustration with the continued extensions without having a plan on forgiving the student loan debt entirely.

Some Democratic lawmakers, such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Elizabeth Warren, have been pressing Biden to cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt through executive actions. Back in March, dozens of Democratic lawmakers sent Biden a letter urging the US leader to extend the pause through the end of the year and “provide meaningful student debt cancellation.”

Biden has said that a move to forgive student loan debt must be authorized by Congress, which would be an uphill battle in the evenly-divided Senate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has also echoed Biden’s comments that only Congress has the authority to forgive student debt. The US leader campaigned on forgiving up to $10,000

There has also been a push to restart payments, led by conservative advocacy groups. The groups say that the moratorium has been generous to those who still suffer from student loan debt repayments, and in a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona back in March, they cited that repayments of student loans would be a way to address the national deficit and counter inflation.

In other related news, Biden expressed support for the efforts to unionize Amazon workers Wednesday, following a vote by one of the company’s warehouses last week in favor of joining a union.

“The choice to join a union belongs to workers alone,” said the US leader in his remarks at the North America Building Trades Unions national conference. “By the way, Amazon, here we come. Watch.”