Joe Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Shows the Power of the Presidency

Also its limitations

Biden and advisors applauding the passage of the CHIPS and Science act in 2022.

Last week the Biden White House announced it was forgiving another $1.2 billion in student debt for 153,000 borrowers. That’s in addition to the $136 billion for 3.7 million borrowers the administration had already forgiven. The Supreme Court last year blocked Biden’s effort to forgive $400 billion through aggressive executive action, but Biden’s been forcefully using existing authority to pursue relief anyway.

Dave Dayen, the Executive Editor at the American Prospect has a great thread on bluesky where he explains just how Biden has managed to forgive all that debt. To some degree the administration has implemented new plans. For instance the latest debt relief is from the SAVE program, which Biden put in place in 2023. It forgives debt for people who have less than $12,000 in outstanding loans and have been paying for 10 years or more.

But for most relief, Biden’s using already existing authority which other presidents had neglected. Around $57 billion in relief is from forgiving loans for teachers, social workers, and others eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Some $5.8 billion was provided for borrowers who had developed disabilities who were supposed to be legally eligible for relief.

Yay for Biden! But even more for activists

Dayen concludes his discussion with a frustrated dig at the former executives who failed to forgive debt. “It's an indictment of every past president that Biden figured out how to run these programs to give people the relief they deserve,” he argues.

I understand that reaction. But I don’t think it’s the right takeaway.

Yes, Biden has made student loan forgiveness work. But that’s not necessarily because he is more competent or even more moral than his predecessors. It’s because the political calculus around student loans changed. And that has much less to do with the personal competence of Biden than it does with advocates and activists who put forgiveness on the party agenda.

Presidents have a lot of power to address issues they care about. But they can’t necessarily care about everything. Time and attention and executive personnel are all limited. So a big part of the job of presidenting is setting an agenda and figuring out what matters most to you.

Donald Trump was quite incompetent, but that’s not why his administration failed to forgive student loans. Trump himself and his appointees like Education Secretary Betsy Devos, opposed forgiveness personally and as a matter of policy. Devos didn’t block relief because she couldn’t figure out the programs; she blocked relief because she wanted to block relief.

Obama did support debt relief. But he was mostly focused on other issues (like for example, the ACA.) He didn’t feel a lot of pressure from his coalition to center student loan forgiveness, so he didn’t.

But in the decade or so since Obama’s presidency, the discussion around student loans in the Democratic party has changed a great deal. Millenial voters and activists presented the issue as one of fairness and equity. Democratic think tanks like Demos started to push debt forgiveness as a vital issue. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders embraced debt relief in his 2016 primary campaign, as did Clinton supporters like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Black advocacy organizations like the NAACP began to talk about student debt as a racial justice issue.

By 2020, when Biden ran for president, student loan forgiveness was an accepted and important part of Democratic policy priorities. Biden’s initial proposals were tepid, especially compared to primary opponents Sanders and Warren. But progressives continued to push, and they convinced a number of high profile advocates, including (again) Elizabeth Warren, Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, and, even more importantly, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden was finally swayed that this was in fact a major concern of voters, Democratic actors, and Democratic leaders. And he’s focused on it ever since. When he lost in the Supreme Court, he looked into other ways to forgive debt. He focused on the relevant programs and made sure they actually began to provide relief.

Biden is quite competent as president, he was better prepared for office than anyone since George HW Bush. But the issue with student loan debt wasn’t (just) one of competence. Presidential priorities and focus are set by the president, but also by the coalition. The Democratic coalition took some time to elevate debt relief to a position of primacy. That’s why former presidents weren’t focused on it.

Presidents need activists, and vice versa

Progressives like Dayen sometimes will condemn presidents for failing to embrace an issue or do the right thing on their own. Shouldn’t presidents follow the law and forgive all the student debt they can without being repeatedly kicked and harangued? Presidents who failed to do that suck; presidents who follow through like Biden are just doing what they always should have done. Either way, the slowness of change, or the existence of setbacks (like an adverse Supreme Court decision) are taken as evidence that presidents aren’t really committed or trustworthy and shouldn’t be supported.

Conversely, partisan Democrats will often bristle when advocates demand more from presidents, or when they try to put new issues on the agenda. Pushing the president is seen as divisive or as potentially harming his standing; ambitious new programs are seen as causing potential electoral harm. So Democratic partisans portray activists as unrealistic wreckers who should be given nothing.

These critiques both fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between activists and presidents. Activists and presidents aren’t (generally) in conflict. Presidents rely on feedback from party actors and activists—like millennial advocates, like the NAACP, like Demos—to inform them about which issues are important and which issues deserve attention. In turn, activists lobbying the government need presidents who are listening and willing to change direction. Presidents who just followed their own moral intuition and didn’t listen to party actors at all would be bad presidents. (There’s some indication that Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman might be that sort of bad president, if given the chance.)

Progressives may not want to give Biden credit for loan forgiveness, since they haven’t been able to get all debt forgiven. But this is misguided; Biden has forgiven a lot of debt, and that should be celebrated, both because it’s helping hundreds of thousands of people, and because we want to build momentum and consensus that forgiving debt is good and that the presidents benefits when  they support it.

Similarly, Democratic partisans may grumble that progressives keep demanding more—but listening to those progressives has given Biden one of his signature policy wins. As Biden heads into 2024 and his team is looking for issues to energize voters in 2024, he would do well to look to progressives and activists for ideas and inspiration. (Claudia Sahm has been making this point.)

Activists and advocates aren’t (just) an annoyance. Presidents need them, because no president can focus on everything at once. Advocates give presidents signals about what is important and what the party wants them to concentrate on.

Sometimes this system works very well—as it has with student loan debt, where we’ve been able to watch Biden and the Democratic party shift position because of advocacy. Other times, when the party is very divided, or when the proposed policy shift is larger—as with Gaza—cooperation between advocates and presidents is more difficult. To put it mildly.

It's important to recognize, though, that policy changes, policy successes, and policy failures aren’t just a function of the president-as-technocrat smoothly working the machinery of government. The presidency is in large part about figuring out which of the almost infinite machines in the White House basement need attention immediately and which can be neglected for now. And that process of choosing is not about individual presidential genius. It’s a collective process in which voters, activists, party institutions, and other party leaders all play an important role.

Again, presidents have a lot of power. But how they use that power is to a large extent up to us. That’s how democracy works, when it does. Student loan forgiveness is a testament to Biden’s ability to get the government to function. But it’s also a testament to all of those who made the moral and practical case that it should function to provide student debtors with relief.