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Education Dept. fast-tracks forgiveness for borrowers with smaller student loans
The SAVE plan is becoming a key vehicle for President Biden’s student loan debt relief efforts. In a Friday press release, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said, “The Biden-Harris Administration designed the SAVE Plan to put community college students and other low-balance borrowers on a faster track to debt forgiveness than ever before.”
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The SAVE plan is becoming a key vehicle for President Biden’s student loan debt relief efforts. In a Friday press release, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said, “The Biden-Harris Administration designed the SAVE Plan to put community college students and other low-balance borrowers on a faster track to debt forgiveness than ever before.”
Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In a surprise move, the Biden administration says it will fast-track a big change, previously scheduled for July, that will soon erase the debts of thousands of federal student loan borrowers – undergraduate as well as graduate students who initially borrowed less than $21,000.
The administration’s cancellation math will work like this: Anyone who borrowed $12,000 or less in federal student loans and has been in repayment for at least 10 years will have their debts automatically erased in February, as long as they first enroll in the Biden administration’s new income-based repayment plan known as SAVE. It does not matter what repayment plan or plans they were in before, so long as they were actively repaying their loans and now enroll in SAVE.
With each additional $1,000 of debt, the window for forgiveness increases by one year. For example, a student who took out $13,000 in loans will now have their debts erased if they’ve been in repayment for 11 years – or in 12 years for those who borrowed $14,000 and so on.
The U.S. Education Department will base the policy on the amount students initially borrowed – not on the amount they currently owe.
“I am proud that my Administration is implementing one of the most impactful provisions of the SAVE plan nearly six months ahead of schedule,” said President Biden in a Friday statement.
“Today’s announcement gives borrowers an even greater reason to check out the SAVE plan and find out if they may qualify for earlier debt relief,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a press release.
The Biden administration does not yet know precisely how many borrowers will immediately qualify for cancellation through the policy change.
On a call Thursday with reporters, Education Under Secretary James Kvaal added that this move will help a particularly vulnerable group of federal student loan borrowers.
“This group has low incomes. About three-quarters of them receive Pell Grants. About one-third of them first attended a community college,” Kvaal told reporters. Perhaps most importantly, “more than 3 in 5 borrowers with defaulted loans originally borrowed less than $12,000.”
Many of these low-debt borrowers also have something else in common, Kvaal said: They left school before completing a degree. In the past, non-completers have often fallen into default because they struggle to repay their debts without the wage premium that comes with a degree.
Until now, one of the department’s signature loan forgiveness efforts had been focused on borrowers with older debts – 20 years or more. This move builds a policy bridge to borrowers who have spent far less time in the student loan system.
SAVE is the most forgiving repayment plan yet (literally)
To qualify for the fast-tracked forgiveness announced on Friday, borrowers need to first enroll in the SAVE plan, which is becoming a key vehicle for President Biden’s debt relief efforts in the wake of the Supreme Court’s scuttling of his broader relief plan. Beginning in February, borrowers enrolled in SAVE will be notified if their debts qualify for cancellation, with no further action required.
The administration also announced that, as of early January, 6.9 million borrowers have enrolled in SAVE with more than half, 3.9 million, making incomes low enough to qualify for a $0 monthly payment.
The SAVE plan exempts more of a borrower’s income from the monthly payment math than previous plans, and, under SAVE, interest no longer accumulates beyond what a borrower can afford to pay each month. Under previous plans, borrowers with low or $0 payments — too low to cover their monthly interest — saw that interest explode. With SAVE, that stops.
What’s more, the plan promises multiple windows for loan forgiveness, which means many borrowers will end up paying far less over time on SAVE than they would have on old plans. In fact, the department itself acknowledges that, under a previous plan for low-income borrowers, borrowers repaid, on average, $10,956 for every $10,000 they borrowed. Under SAVE, they will pay back just $6,121.
That’s why Republicans in Congress have been fighting to stop SAVE.
“President Biden is downright desperate to buy votes before the election – so much so that he greenlights the Department of Education to dump even more kerosene on an already raging student debt fire,” said the Republican chair of the House Education Committee, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, after Friday’s announcement. “It would surprise no one if the Department relied on infants playing with abacuses to balance its books – it is a complete and utter disaster.”
While House Republicans have fought the plan, President Biden has said, even if Congress does send him a bill to kill SAVE, which the Senate seems unwilling to do, he’ll veto it.
Friday’s announcement comes after the department’s shaky launch of its new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, form – which included a big mistake that will lower the amount of federal aid many applicants receive unless it’s remedied soon. The department is wrestling with when, and how, to fix this mistake, all while navigating a funding crisis.
Paul B. Miller shops at The Market food pantry in Logan, Ohio on Dec. 9. Food aid was just one of many services offered here that faced disruption in 2025.
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LOGAN, Ohio – Before dawn, in a cold, blustery drizzle, a line forms outside a small, squat building on an open stretch of road on the outskirts of town.
“My heater quit working in my car,” Scott Skinner says good-naturedly to the next man in line. “Man, what kinda luck am I having.”
The building is called “The Market” because it has a food pantry, but Skinner and the others are here to sign up for heating assistance. He’s been calling for a month to get an appointment with no luck, so he showed up an hour ago to snag a walk-in slot.
The demand for help is more acute than usual because heating aid was suspended during the recent government shutdown. At the same time, SNAP food benefits were suspended for weeks, and some food pantry shoppers are still playing catch up.
One of those people is Lisa Murphy. She’s 61, disabled and relies on Social Security, and says it’s important to have “places like this that really help us.”
“I still owe my gas bill. I owe $298,” Murphy says. “It’s hard to buy food and pay my bills, too.”
Lisa Murphy grocery shops at The Market food pantry in Logan, Ohio. She’s still behind on bills after SNAP food benefits were paused for two weeks during the recent federal shutdown.
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A detail from Miller’s grocery cart; signs tell clients the number of items that can be taken.
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Rich-Joseph Facun for NPR
But even as need grows with rising costs and unemployment, local anti-poverty groups like the one that runs The Market say their work has been threatened as never before amid the Trump administration’s funding cuts, pauses and reversals targeting a long list of safety-net programs. The shutdown was only the latest disruption that forced them to scramble to keep operating.
And, they say, the year of chaos has left deep uncertainty over which programs may be hit next.
‘Emergency response mode’
The Market in Logan, Ohio, is part of Hocking Athens Perry Community Action – HAPCAP for short – one of a thousand such agencies across the country that have been around since the 1960s. They connect some 15 million people with housing, health care, food aid and much more.
At HAPCAP, services include Meals on Wheels, Head Start, a public bus system, employment help, and a food bank that serves 10 counties across southeast Appalachian Ohio.
It’s an impressive range, but this year that’s also made it a big target for federal funding cuts.
“Eighty percent of our funding comes from federal grants,” says executive director Kelly Hatas. The “worst day” of her career was back in January, when the Trump administration ordered a federal funding freeze, saying it wanted to shift priorities and promote efficiency.
“When we got that news we were in immediate emergency response mode, like, what are we going to do?” she says.
Kelly Hatas, executive director of Hocking Athens Perry Community Action (HAPCAP), talks with the child of a couple who are shopping at the food pantry. Hatas says the nonprofit has had to scramble all year as various safety-net programs were hit with federal funding cuts or pauses.
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The most urgent threat was to six Head Start centers.
“Our Head Start director was on a call with all of her center coordinators telling them we’re laying everyone off tomorrow,” Hatas recalls. “And then there was some secondary information that was like, ‘Just kidding … Head Start is excluded.’”
That whiplash shook people’s trust. And the hits kept coming.
In March, the administration canceled or paused a billion dollars that helped food banks. In May, President Trump’s budget called for zeroing out Head Start and heating assistance, along with major cuts to other safety-net programs like rental aid. He also proposed eliminating the $770 million dollar Community Services Block Grant that directly supports these anti-poverty groups, including it in a list of “woke programs.”
Congress eventually funded many of those programs, but the Office of Management and Budget took months to get out the block grant money.
“OMB just decided not to spend it, totally usurping congressional authority,” says David Bradley, who advocates for these local groups with the National Community Action Foundation.
He says they’ve long had strong bipartisan support.
“So we’ve had two major fights with the administration,” he says. “We won them because Republicans helped.”
East Main Street in Logan, a small town in southeast Appalachian Ohio.
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In a statement, an OMB spokesperson said these anti-poverty programs fund “radically partisan activities, like teaching toddlers to be antiracist and ‘LGBTQIA+ welcoming.’” It also criticized a program that combined affordable housing with clean energy “in the pursuit of both economic and environmental justice.”
“President Trump ran on fiscal responsibility and ending wasteful DEI spending in government,” the statement says.“The American taxpayer should not be made to fund critical race theory.”
Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said the agency “administers CSBG consistent with the funding levels Congress provides to support services for low-income families.”
Funding chaos and uncertainty
In Ohio, Hatas says the state has shifted money to help address federal funding crises as they’ve popped up to keep programs going. But the biggest challenge remains uncertainty.
“The panic and the just day-to-day not knowing what’s going to happen, is just really difficult,” she says.
Because of that, HAPCAP has scaled back some plans, including for a new Head Start facility and a much-needed homeless shelter. It’s also had to pull out of food distribution at schools because of a lack of staff. Some employees are leaving, worried about losing their jobs. Others have been laid off or had their hours trimmed.
“It cut my paychecks completely in half,” says Kelsey Sexton, who manages the front desk but was shifted to part-time in the fall. “We have a mortgage, a car payment. With Christmas coming, my husband was like, what are we going to do?”
She was bumped back up to full-time – but so far only temporarily – after the shutdown pause in SNAP payments brought a surge of people to the food pantry.
Losing a job can be extra tough in rural communities.
“We don’t really have jobs growing on trees … and so there’s nowhere for these folks to go,” says Megan Riddlebarger, who heads the Corporation for Ohio Appalachian Development (COAD) half an hour away in Athens.
Kelsey Sexton (left) had her hours as a desk clerk at HAPCAP cut in half. Megan Riddlebarger (right) heads the Corporation for Ohio Appalachian Development and says anti-poverty agencies are important for local economies in this rural region.
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She oversees federal funding for 17 antipoverty groups across the eastern part of the state, and says they’re important for rural economies.
“These aren’t just, like, people volunteering for fun,” she says. “These are some of the biggest businesses in town, buying most of the products that are bought and sold in the town.”
Helping people stay warm and at home
Down a flight of stairs from Riddlebarger’s office, five burly men at long desks take notes as Dave Freeman goes over how to properly install a water heater vent. It’s a refresher training class for inspectors, part of a weatherization assistance program the White House also wanted to end.
Freeman says many older homes in the area are full of cracks and crevices with almost no insulation.
“That house that you walk in (that) has the blanket at the stairway, so ‘Oh, honey, I haven’t been upstairs, it’s so cold up there,’” he says.
Weatherizing homes not only lets people live comfortably, it also saves them money.
“Say their electric bill goes down or gas bill goes down, they might be able to buy a pizza on a Saturday night,” Freeman says. “And that’s a big thing.”
Adam Murdock (left) attends attends a training class for weatherization inspectors at the Corporation for Ohio Appalachian Development.
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But COAD’s funding for weatherization was delayed months, which jeopardized staffing. “You can get paid to do similar work in the private sector, and so retaining that staff is already a challenge,” says Riddlebarger.
Most of the agencies she oversees were able to cover the gap until money finally came through in November. But she says it means squeezing what’s supposed to be a year-long program into about half that time “with the same expectations for performance reporting.”
Diana Eads’ volunteer job with COAD – which includes a small stipend – was also at risk earlier this year, when the Trump administration gutted AmeriCorps grants with little explanation. As part of the AmeriCorps Seniors companion program Eads visits and helps out low-income people.
“My companions have been elderly, they’re not able to get out,” she says. “They’re just one-step away from nursing home care.”
Diana Eads, 74, visits with elderly people as part of the AmeriCorps seniors program. When a funding cut threatened her small stipend for gas money, she told an 88-year-old woman who lives far away that she would keep visiting no matter what.
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Rich-Joseph Facun for NPR
If they were to land in a nursing home or assisted living, that could cost thousands of dollars a month in Medicaid spending. But Eads helps keep them at home for just $4 dollars an hour, to help cover gas or other small bills.
“Being rural, my one companion, it’s 56 miles roundtrip,” she says.
Riddlebarger managed to secure local philanthropic funding to keep operating, and after a legal challenge AmeriCorps federal funding was restored.
Through it all Eads reassured her companion, an 88-year old woman she’d been visiting for five years.
“I told her no matter what happened, I would not stop visiting,” Eads says. “That was important.”
A grim 2026 outlook
After a year struggling to keep serving those most in need, advocates say they don’t see much relief in site. Republicans in Congress passed major cuts to Medicaid and SNAP food aid and those will start to take hold.
The Trump administration also is considering dramatic limits to rental assistance and has laid out major cuts to long-term housing for people leaving homelessness, a move that faces a legal challenge.
On top of that, the administration’s mass firings and buyouts hit hard in offices that administer various safety-net programs.
The Market runs a food pantry and helps connect people with other services. In December, people seeking an appointment for heating assistance often line up outside before dawn.
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Rich-Joseph Facun for NPR
Riddlebarger says most anti-poverty funding already falls far short of the need, and making it even harder to help people is exhausting.
“Not knowing which of our many services we are going to be able to keep operating makes us waste valuable capacity trying to plug holes that shouldn’t be holes,” she says. “We’re just breaking the wheel and reinventing it at a great cost to all parties.”
People walk through the snow in Brooklyn after an overnight storm on Saturday in New York City.
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
An intense cyclone system is fueling a mix of severe weather, including a winter storm that will impact upper parts of the United States.
Heavy snow, blizzards, extreme cold and damaging winds are likely to create hazardous conditions stretching from Montana east to Maine, and Texas north to Pennsylvania, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).
More than eight million people were under winter storm warnings from the NWS on Sunday afternoon. Nearly two million people were under blizzard warnings. Meteorologists warn that after winter weather Friday and Saturday, an arctic front clashing with warm air could rapidly intensify into a ‘bomb cyclone’ over the Midwest and Great Lakes through Monday. A ‘bomb cyclone’ or bombogenesis is a rapidly deepening area of low pressure that creates harsh weather conditions.
“We are anticipating some pretty big snows over the next 24 hours, especially across east central Minnesota to northern Wisconsin to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. A lot of those places will have 6-12 inches,” NWS Lead Forecaster Bob Oravec told NPR on Sunday.
Blizzard conditions will cause near zero visibility and possible power outages Sunday night though Monday evening in some locations in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, according to the NWS Marquette. A foot of snow or more is possible in areas along Lake Superior with 40 to 65 mile per hour winds, according to forecasts.
Marquette Mayor Paul Schloegel told NPR on Sunday the Marquette Board of Light & Power is prepared to handle any loss of electricity. He said in an email the main priority is keeping people safe.
“We tend to heed the advice of our weather forecasters and prepare to hunker down as needed,” Schloegel wrote. “As far as taking care of the snow, our extremely dedicated public works and MDOT crews do a great job taking care of our residents, they are true professionals. Roads are usually back to normal within 24 [hours].”
Schloegel said Marquette residents appreciate a good blizzard while taking precautions.
“We choose to live here for our love of [four] full seasons and appreciate the effect the greatest lake, Lake Superior, has on our climate,” he said.
Minnesota is also bracing for major impacts. Blizzard and winter storm warnings and advisories are in place for most of the state. As much as 10 inches of snow could fall in the Twin Cities and potentially life-threatening travel conditions are likely through early Monday morning, according to the NWS.
The ‘bomb cyclone’ is also sending cold temperatures below freezing.
Residents of Havre, Mont., about 45 miles south of the Canadian border, could feel wind chill values as low as 15 degrees below zero late Sunday. The actual temperature is forecast to fall to 2 degrees below zero.
Farther south in Dallas, Texas, temperatures are expected to drop dramatically from the 80s on Sunday to highs in the 40s on Monday, according to the NWS.
In the Northeast, freezing rain could cause travel problems, including icing in northern New England and northern New York state, late Sunday into Monday, according to Oravec.
When colder air moves into New York City early this week, remaining snow on the ground from the weekend storm will freeze and create further hazardous travel conditions, Oravec said.
Bob Kafka, a disabled Vietnam veteran, talks with an Austin Police Officer as he and others try to enter a hotel property.
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Bob Kafka, a renowned disability rights advocate, died at his Austin, Texas, home on Friday. He was 79 years old.
Kafka was an organizer with ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today), a group which advocates for policy change to support people with disabilities.
Mark Johnson, co-founder of ADAPT and a longtime friend of Kafka who confirmed his death, told NPR Kafka’s advocacy was as much about changing laws as it was changing lives.
“Maybe it was helping somebody tie their shoes and the next moment, maybe it was helping feed them, or maybe it was raising money through the fun run, or maybe it was negotiating with federal officials,” said Johnson.
Kafka was born in New York City, but spent most of his life in Texas. He was an Army veteran and fought in the Vietnam War.
Since being paralyzed from a 1973 car accident, Kafka, alongside his wife, Stephanie Thomas, prioritized seeking dignity for those with disabilities and helping others adjust to their new lives. Kafka could be seen at disability rights protests sporting a halo of white curls and an unruly beard.
“Very, very rarely do you find people that can, can do what needs to be done and not go around boasting about it,” said Johnson.
He also recalled the selfless nature of the community Kafka fostered, including how Thomas’ first instinct was to ask how he was feeling about losing a friend.
“I’m going, ‘Wait a minute, I’m calling you to ask you how you are,’” Johnson said.
Johnson remembered Kafka as a policy wonk who was as interested in the mechanics of federal bureaucracy as grassroots organizing. He said he hopes his friend will be honored for his work to influence change at all levels.
“If you mention disability to an average crowd, it’s gonna, think of something negative. Bob and others may help people make that shift,” Johnson said.
“They say claiming your identity – your full identity – can be very powerful, very liberating. And I think Bob was one of those people that’s been doing that for 50 years.”
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