Joe Biden: Student loan forgiveness is “passed. I got it passed by a vote or two. And it’s in effect.”
PolitiFact's ruling: False
Here's why: Just two months after he announced a new administration effort to forgive between $10,000 and $20,000 of student loan debt, President Joe Biden got key details of the plan wrong at a public event.
Biden was speaking during a televised forum sponsored by Now This, a liberal online media outlet. Footage of the event, held at the White House, was posted online Oct. 23.
At one point, the discussion turned to Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
As Biden explained it, "What we’ve provided for is, if you went to school, if you qualified for a Pell Grant … you qualify for $20,000 in debt forgiveness. Secondly, if you don’t have one of those loans, you just get $10,000 written off. It’s passed. I got it passed by a vote or two. And it’s in effect. And already a total of, I think it’s now 13 million people, have applied for that service."
But there are two key problems with Biden’s statement: how the policy came to be and whether it’s "in effect."
Biden didn’t go through Congress to pursue student debt relief. Technically, Biden didn’t issue an executive order, either.
Rather, his administration drew on the HEROES Act, a law passed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that allows relief from student loan payments during times of war or national emergency.
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