Failures By Obama Team Put Student Debt Forgiveness In Jeopardy

Kevin Carey and Alexander Holt were quoted in BuzzFeed News about the underestimated costs of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program:

The news “puts the whole [loan forgiveness] program at risk,” said Kevin Carey, director of education policy at the left-leaning New America Foundation, a think tank. “There are people in Congress that are antagonistic to the idea of loan forgiveness in general, and these numbers are a justification. They provide budgetary argument for saying, ‘We can’t afford this.’”

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The GAO’s report calls that assumption into question, said Alexander Holt, a policy analyst at New America. “If it actually saves money for the government to get rid of Grad PLUS that could be huge,” he said. “It would be easy to potentially eliminate.”

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“Not only are the optics bad, but now there’s a scandal — the Education Department has been massively underestimating the costs of their programs through sheer negligence,” said Holt. “It’s extremely important from a political calculus. Trump has been talking about getting rid of the department — now they can say, look, they can’t even keep track of their biggest program costs.”