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Budget Report: Biden Dropping Student Loan Forgiveness He Promised During Campaign 

   DailyWire.com
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 24: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks during an Equal Pay Day event in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on March 24, 2021 in Washington, DC. Highlighting the gender pay gap, Equal Pay Day raises awareness that women in the United States earned $0.82 for every dollar men earned in 2019, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

President Joe Biden is reportedly dropping student loan forgiveness, a promise he made during his campaign for POTUS, from this upcoming budget.

“Four months into his term, the pressure remains on Biden to follow through on a campaign promise to forgive $10,000 in federal student loans for every borrower,” Yahoo Finance reported this weekend.

However, Biden’s $10,000 forgiveness promise seems to be “off the table” for this budget, the report added, noting of Biden’s recent interview with The New York Times.

“The idea that you go to Penn and you’re paying a total of 70,000 bucks a year and the public should pay for that? I don’t agree,” Biden told to Times last week.

The Washington Post on Friday, too, reported that “several ‘ambitious Biden campaign pledges’ will likely be left out of the annual White House budget — including student debt forgiveness,” CNBC noted.

“President Biden is still waiting for the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education to report on their review of his legal authority to forgive student loan debt through executive order,” said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz, CNBC reported.

Kantrowitz emphasized that Biden likely does not have the authority to forgive such debt, bouncing the issue to Congress. “Only after he receives that report, which I expect will find that he does not have the legal authority, will the ball be in Congress’ court,” he explained.

Notably, leading Democrats have called for executive action from Biden to wash away up to a stunning $50,000 in federal student loan debt, and they wanted it done in Biden’s first 100 days.

Biden, although the White House later backtracked, has suggested he won’t go near such an amount. As highlighted by The Daily Wire, the White House has made it clear that “Biden is able, under authority ceded to him under the Higher Education Act, to forgive around $10,000 per individual federal student loan borrower through an executive order, but that forgiving any amount above that must go through Congress.”

The president reiterated this during a February town hall event:

Biden told his audience, in a town hall … that he would not sign on to a plan to forgive $50,000 in student loan debt for individual federal borrowers, telling a questioner, bluntly, that, “I will not make that happen.”

“My point is: I understand the impact of debt, and it can be debilitating,” Biden said, noting that his children were among those who incurred hundreds of thousands in student debt from undergraduate and graduate studies. “I am prepared to write off the $10,000 debt but not fifty because I don’t think I have the authority to do it.”

Unsurprisingly, this did not go over well with fellow radical Democrats. Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for example, went after Biden online.

“The case against student loan forgiveness is looking shakier by the day,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “We’ve got the *Senate Majority Leader* on board to forgive $50k. Biden’s holding back, but many of the arguments against it just don’t hold water on close inspection. We can and should do it. Keep pushing!”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) publicly agreed with AOC.

Related: White House Backtracks After Biden Blasted For Saying He Won’t Forgive $50K In Student Loan Debt

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