Hassan, colleagues press Department of Education to act on promised overhaul of public service loan forgiveness program to help military service members
WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), and 13 of their Senate colleagues are pushing the Biden Administration to implement changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program that will make it easier for military service members to access benefits.
The letter is the latest in Senator Hassan’s work on this issue. The Senator introduced a bipartisan bill earlier this year to expedite service members’ loan forgiveness, and last month, the Biden administration announced that it would do so. The Department of Education has already provided relief to many borrowers under the new rules, but the changes have not yet been fully implemented while thousands of service members are in urgent need of aid.
In the letter, Senator Hassan and her colleagues call on the Department of Education to move quickly to implement these changes, writing, “These changes to PSLF will be critically important for service members, veterans, and their families. An estimated 200,000 service members collectively now owe more than $2.9 billion in student loans, and many of them planned their financial futures around the promise of eventual student debt relief. However, a recent Government Accountability Office report indicated that approximately 94 percent of service members and civilian employees of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) who previously applied for relief through the program have been denied.”