Joe Biden spent four years promising to cancel student loan debt. The Supreme Court said no. The courts said no. Now the bill has come due, and millions of working Americans are in default - but employees of lefty nonprofits like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), which openly work to subvert the law, can have their loans forgiven. For now.
Today, roughly 9.5 million people (one in five federal student loan borrowers) are more than nine months behind on their payments. That number has nearly doubled from 5.3 million in just over a year. Out of $1.7 trillion in federally backed student debt, $233.3 billion is now in default.
Payments were suspended during the COVID pandemic and formally resumed in 2023, but Biden tacked on an additional "on-ramp" period during which missed payments couldn't trigger default, a promise he had no legal authority to extend indefinitely. The Supreme Court struck down his sweeping forgiveness plan. Lower courts blocked his workarounds. The checks never arrived. The debt never disappeared. When that final buffer expired in fall 2024, the defaults came roaring back.
Jason Altmire, president of Career Education Colleges and Universities, acknowledged the pandemic played a role but pointed to another culprit: the chaos Biden created by dangling debt cancellation in front of borrowers for years, only to have it repeatedly struck down in court.
"We take it seriously," Altmire said. "It's a real problem."
It is. And Biden made it worse.
Borrowers who attended for-profit colleges have been hit particularly hard. Thirty-three percent were at least 90 days behind, more than twice the rate among borrowers who attended public institutions. Of the schools in the top quarter for nonpayment rates, 76 percent were for-profit institutions. These aren't Wall Street borrowers. They're working Americans who took a chance on a better future and got left holding the bill.
Even liberal borrower advocates can't deny the damage. "Folks are struggling to make ends meet and cover all the rising costs of everything else. The growing student loan bills are making things worse and folks are falling behind," said Aissa Canchola Bañez, policy director for the left-leaning advocacy group Protect Borrowers. When the people who cheered Biden's promises are admitting the crisis is real, that tells you everything.
The highest default rates are concentrated in the South, where voters Biden and the left dismissed as undeserving of economic relief are located. Mississippi leads with a 28.3 percent default rate, followed by Louisiana, Alabama, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas. Nearly every one of those states voted for President Trump. Puerto Rico's default rate reached 30.9 percent, higher than any state in the nation. These are working-class Americans who were handed false promises instead of straight answers.
Rather than immediately unleashing federal collectors on struggling borrowers, the Trump administration has temporarily paused involuntary collections, including wage garnishment and Treasury Offset seizures, to give people room to get back on track. Defaulted borrowers may still see their credit reports take a hit.
The breathing room is tied to real reforms. The Biden-era SAVE plan (the Saving on a Valuable Education program) is being eliminated, and the broader maze of repayment options has been scrapped under the Working Families Tax Cuts Act. New borrowers now choose between a single standard plan or one income-driven option. Millions who were enrolled in SAVE have 90 days from July 1 to select a new plan; those who don't will be placed into standard repayment, which could mean a higher monthly bill.
The new income-driven option waives unpaid interest for borrowers who make their required payments, even if those payments don't fully cover what's accrued. Borrowers who have already defaulted also get a second shot at loan rehabilitation, a second chance that didn't exist under prior law.
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There's a separate program worth scrutinizing while all of this plays out: Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), which wipes out remaining federal student debt after 120 qualifying payments for employees of government agencies and certain nonprofits. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), one of the most aggressive left-wing litigation shops in the country, which is also under indictment for wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, is confirmed as an eligible employer in the federal PSLF database, meaning its employees can have their loans erased on the taxpayer's dime. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), which has openly worked to shield illegal immigrants from federal immigration enforcement and has funded violence against ICE agents in California, has sought the same benefit for its staff.
The Trump administration's new PSLF rule, finalized in October 2025, closes that door for organizations engaged in activities with a "substantial illegal purpose,” explicitly including violations of federal immigration law. Whether groups like CHIRLA survive that scrutiny is now a live legal question, not a hypothetical. For the working-class borrowers in Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia who are struggling to make their own payments, the idea that activist nonprofits were getting their loans quietly forgiven while ordinary Americans defaulted is exactly the kind of Washington double standard that voters have grown sick of.
Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent placed responsibility for the current mess squarely on the previous administration.
"After the Biden Administration misled borrowers into believing their student loans would not need to be repaid, the Trump Administration is committed to helping student and parent borrowers resume regular, on-time repayment, with more clear and affordable options, which will support a stronger financial future for borrowers and enhance the long-term health of the federal student loan portfolio."
Biden's student loan agenda was always a mirage: years of promises, political stunts, and court fights that changed exactly one thing: the date the bill came due. Nine-point-five million Americans are now living with the fallout.
Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.
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