OnPolitics: Pres. Biden considers canceling $10K in student loan debt

Greetings, OnPolitics readers!

Three months before FBI agents descended on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, federal officials were privately outlining the urgency of a Justice Department investigation into the former president's handling of classified documents to Trump's attorneys, according to a May letter from the National Archives and Records Administration.

In a communication, first disclosed by the conservative media outlet Just the News, the acting archivist summarily rejected Trump's efforts to shield documents from scrutiny and notified attorneys that FBI agents would begin reviewing an initial cache of highly-sensitive materials recovered from Trump's Florida property in January.

"There are important national security interests in the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community getting access to these materials," Debra Steidel Wall wrote in the May 10 letter to Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran, adding that more than 100 classified documents were recovered in the initial 15 boxes of documents transferred to the National Archives from Mar-a-Lago.

The classified documents, Wall wrote, represented more than 700 pages, adding that the papers were marked as "classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials."

It's Amy with today's top stories out of Washington.

Biden may move to cancel $10,000 in student loan debt as soon as Wednesday

President Joe Biden is expected to announce as soon as Wednesday whether to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt, according to sources familiar with discussions, as the White House nears a self-imposed deadline for a decision.

After weighing action for months, the president is expected to reveal a decision after he returns to the White House from vacation in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Any action would likely include extending a moratorium on federal student loan payments that was implemented during the coronavirus pandemic.

The president has said he would make a decision by Aug. 31. The parameters are still unclear. But the White House has zeroed in on a plan that would cancel up to $10,000 in student loan debt per borrower, according to sources familiar with talks, a figure Biden campaigned on.

The debt cancellation would be limited to borrowers with family incomes of $125,000 or less, and would apply only to people with federal loans, not private ones. More than 43 million people have federal student loan debt in the U.S., and the average borrower has about $37,000, according to data compiled by the Education Data Initiative. The outstanding federal loan balance is about $1.6 trillion.

Pressure from Democrats: Biden faces increasing pressure from progressive Democrats to cancel an even larger share of debt for Americans who took federal loans to pay for college. But some Democratic economists, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, worry that the debt cancelation could exacerbate 40-year-high inflation.

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America's fierce debate over voting access intensifies before midterm election

Not since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was pushed through Congress amid the push for racial justice during the civil rights movement has the U.S. witnessed such a furious debate over how states conduct elections.

Many states adopted new rules making it easier to vote in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including mail-in voting without an excuse, early voting and same-day voter registration that were praised by leaders of both parties.

While many Democratic-led states worked to make permanent those pandemic-era changes, the legislatures controlled by Republicans in swing states began to champion election security measures which enacted stricter rules on mail-in ballots, voting hours and administrative oversight.

Local measures to restrict voting access: In Texas, GOP lawmakers successfully banned 24-hour and drive-thru voting, enacted ID requirements for mail-in ballots and established new crimes for vote harvesting and denying access to poll watchers.

Meanwhile, with Congress failing to pass new voting rights legislation, even Democratic-controlled states are taking matters into their own hands.

Read our full guide to U.S. voter laws: As the country heads into a critical midterm election, the USA TODAY Network, with newsrooms in nearly every state, has gathered information from across the country that has reviewed those changes. The result is a voting rights guide aimed at helping voters navigate how laws in their state are changing ahead of the fall contests.

The examination follows a USA TODAY report in 2021, which looked at more than 245 state laws and found that while some states expanded voting access, the cumulative result was 55 million eligible voters are in states that have limited ballot access.

'The perfect target'? 📚 Librarians have become targets of a new front in the culture wars over what and how to teach children about race and sex. -- Amy

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: President Joe Biden considers canceling $10K in student loan debt