White House unveils application form for Biden’s student debt relief

The White House on Tuesday unveiled new details for how tens of millions of Americans will be able to apply for student loan forgiveness and outlined how it plans to prevent fraud in the relief program.

Senior administration officials released a preview of the application that most borrowers will be required to fill out in order to receive debt relief that President Joe Biden announced in August.

The simple form will be hosted on a .gov website when it goes live later this month, officials said. It will also be available in a mobile format and a Spanish version.

The application contains only a handful of questions that seek basic information about borrowers: name, social security number, date of birth, phone number and email address.

Borrowers will be required to check a box that “certifies under penalty of perjury” that they meet the income threshold for the debt relief program. The relief is available to borrowers whose adjusted gross income in 2020 or 2021 was less than $125,000 for individuals or $250,000 for couples filing taxes jointly.

Income verification has long been a central challenge for the Education Department as it prepares to implement a means-tested student debt relief program. While the agency has detailed information about Americans’ federal student loans, it lacks income information for most borrowers.

A senior administration official told reporters that the self-certification process that the administration is planning will contain “strict fraud prevention measures” that are “risk-based.”

As part of that effort, the Education Department plans to require as many as several million borrowers who it believes are higher-income and likely to exceed the income cutoff to undergo extra scrutiny before receiving any relief.

Those borrowers will have to log into StudentAid.gov with their Federal Student Aid ID and upload a copy of their tax returns or proof they didn’t have to file taxes, according to officials and documents released by the administration. Borrowers will have until March 31, 2024 to submit those materials.

Education Department officials estimated that between 1 million and 5 million borrowers will have to upload their income information as part of that verification process, according to documents posted online by the Office of Management and Budget.

The administration declined to detail how it would determine which borrowers would be selected for the additional layer of verification. The official said only that it would be based on “known characteristics” of borrowers.

“We're confident that these measures — combined with clear communication about eligibility requirements to public — will result in a simple straightforward process that allows eligible borrowers to obtain relief and ensures ineligible borrowers do not,” the official told reporters.

Education Department officials also disclosed in documents posted by OMB on Tuesday that the agency expects that the cost of developing and processing the debt relief applications will cost roughly $100 million per year.

That figure includes “costs related to development of website forms, servicer processing, borrower support, paper form processing and communications related to this effort,” the agency said.

Some GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), the top Republican on the House education committee, have called for Congress to block funding needed by the Education Department to carry out the debt relief program.

Administration officials also confirmed on Tuesday that they plan to move ahead with plans to begin accepting applications later this month, even amid a deluge of legal challenges from Republican officials and conservative groups who are racing to get their cases before the Supreme Court.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Missouri is set to hear arguments on whether to grant a request by GOP attorneys general to halt the program, which they argue is an illegal abuse of executive authority.

The Education Department has vowed in court filings that it will not discharge any debt before October 23. A second senior administration told reporters on Tuesday that the administration “will make the form available in October.”

The official also said the Education Department has been working with its existing contractors to build the capacity for a large influx of web traffic and applications all at once when the process opens.

“We are aware of how big this project is that we're working on and how important it is for 40 million borrowers and their families and communities and how much excitement there's going to be and we're planning for that,” the official said.