Joe Biden will not include student loan forgiveness in his upcoming Budget, after pledging to cancel $10,000 from loans on the campaign trail.
Biden is due to announce his latest budget at the end of next week, and claims he has grown suspicious of wiping out the loans.
The shift in policy is a major blow for the more than 42 million Americans who have student loans.
Biden had been pressured by progressives in the Democrat Party including Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to forgive up to $50,000 in debt. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, was also in favor.
In an interview with the New York Times Friday, Biden said he had grown ‘suspicious’ of canceling the debt.
‘The idea that you go to Penn and you’re paying a total of 70,000 bucks a year and the public should pay for that? I don’t agree,’ Biden told the Times.
The White House has previously said Biden wanted to see Congress pass legislation to wipe away student debt, rather than through executive order.
Joe Biden campaigned on canceling up to $10,000 of debt per student, but has since fallen out of favor of issuing an executive order
Students demonstrate against higher education debt at a protest at Hunter College in New York City in 2015. After campaigning to cancel $10,000 debt, Biden has now dropped it
Progressive Democrats including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (left) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (right) have pressed the Biden administration to erase $50,000 in debt load from every student borrower
The announcement marks a shift from the White House’s previous position last month when Biden’s chief of staff Ronald Klain said the president was considering canceling up to $50,000 in debt.
Klain told a Politico Playbook event that Biden has asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to figure out if the president has the legal authority to wipe out their balances.
In March, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said they were still ‘exploring options’ around student loan policy.
‘The President continues to call on Congress to cancel $10,000 in debt for student loan borrowers,’ she said.
‘That’s something Congress could take an action on, and he’d be happy to sign.’
Warren had previously called on Biden to wipe away the debt using executive order.
‘Biden-Harris can cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt, giving tens of millions of Americans an immediate financial boost and helping to close the racial wealth gap,’ Warren Tweeted in November, days after the election was called in Biden’s favor.
‘This is the single most effective executive action available for a massive economic stimulus.’
In February, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced the President preferred for Congress to pass legislation for student debt relief
In February, AOC claimed Biden’s ‘case against student loan forgiveness is looking shakier by the day’ and pointed out that the Senate’s Democratic Leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer, is on board with the $50,000 amount of debt relief
In February, AOC attacked Biden for refusing to write off the full $50,000 figure she and Warren had been seeking.
That month, Biden told a CNN town hall attendee, ‘I will not make that happen,’ when she said $50,000 should be the number and not his proposed $10,000.
The president argued that it would be hard to tell a community he was going to write-off debt from Harvard or Yale instead of investing in childhood education.
AOC complained, saying: ‘Entire generations of working class kids were encouraged to go into more debt under the guise of elitism. This is wrong.’
According to Government statistics released in January, 42.3 million people, or one in six adults, in America have a student debt.
The average outstanding loan amount is $36,520.