President

Joe

Biden announced a new round of federal student loan forgiveness on Wednesday as borrowers brace for a restart of payments after a three-year pause that began during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Democratic president’s latest move will help 125,000 borrowers by forgiving $9 billion in debt through existing relief programs. In total, 3.6 million borrowers will have had $127 billion in debt wiped out since Biden took office.

President Biden has long believed that college should be a ticket for the middle class, not a burden that falls on families, the White House said in a statement.

Biden was expected to make a formal announcement at the White House

in on Wednesday

afternoon.

He promised to help ease the burden of student debt as he ran for president, and he is under pressure to follow through even as his original plan was rejected by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

He’s relying on a patchwork of different programs to pay down the debt, such as federal bond forgiveness and the SAVE Plan, which lowers payments by tying them to borrowers’ incomes.

For years, millions of eligible borrowers lacked access to the student debt relief they qualified for, but that has all changed thanks to President Biden and his administration’s continued efforts to fix the broken student loan system, Secretary of Education said Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

Additional debt forgiveness could help soften the impact of the long-planned resumption of loan payments this month, which will put a dent in tens of millions of household budgets. But this is unlikely to undermine the economy’s long-term strength, even though BNP Paribas analysts estimate it could deprive consumers of $100 billion and slow overall growth in the final three months of this year.

Republicans have fought Biden’s plans on student debt, but Wednesday’s announcement comes as they are consumed by a power struggle on Capitol Hill. Far-right Republicans forced a vote that impeached Rep. Kevin McCarthy

R-California, (R-Bakersfield)

as Speaker of the House of Representatives, leaving the House in chaos.

Additionally, the NAACP is pushing Biden to expand debt forgiveness by making Parent PLUS loans, which parents use for their children’s college educations, eligible for the SAVE Plan.

“Historically, education has been seen as an entry point for marginalized communities to achieve upward mobility and begin building generational wealth,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement highlighting the disproportionate impact of debt on Black families. It is inconceivable that black parents, in their quest to provide a better future for their children, have become victims of a system that takes advantage of their inherent disadvantage.