Joe Biden will commit an additional $9 billion to student debt relief, the White House said Wednesday. The focus is on promoting the American president’s concrete actions as the Republican Party tears itself apart.
According to a press release from the American executive branch, this measure will benefit 125,000 Americans.
“The President has long believed that college should be a gateway to the middle class, not a burden on families,” the White House said.
The decision announced on Wednesday will particularly benefit people with disabilities.
In total, the Biden administration says it has canceled around $127 billion in student debt, benefiting 3.6 million people.
However, the American president’s room for maneuver in this matter is limited: at the end of June, the right-wing Supreme Court rejected a much more massive measure from the White House that could have wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars in debt.
Higher education costs a fortune in the United States, and more than 43 million people have to pay back federal student loans totaling more than $1.6 trillion.
Since the beginning of the week, due to internal disagreements in the Republican Party, the American president has chosen to stay away from the chaos that has engulfed the American Congress.
The 80-year-old Democrat, a candidate for re-election, is reportedly focused on his big projects on economic and social issues.
This week, for example, he spoke about his policies benefiting people with disabilities while his administration asserted that it has made significant progress in reducing drug costs, which are sometimes exorbitant in the United States.