D.C. deal tells 45 million student debtors what their government thinks of them

In the sometimes surrealistic modern dance that was the debt-ceiling standoff that dominated Washington this spring, only one thing seemed clear from the very beginning: Somebody was going to have to pay for this mess.

Negotiators for Congress and the White House could have rolled back the 2017 Donald Trump-era tax cuts that largely benefited billionaires and big corporations and are adding close to $2 trillion to the federal debt over a decade. Another target-rich environment would have been the Pentagon, whose annual budget is closing in on $900 billion, still more than the world’s next 10 largest militaries combined.

Instead, they went after Jenni Jones — a 42-year-old woman, currently unemployed and living in North Philadelphia, whose ever-rising student debt (accumulated more than a decade ago) is roughly $95,000, and rising. She’s one of about 45 million Americans who will be required to resume hefty payments before the end of the summer if the debt-ceiling deal gets through Capitol Hill ahead of a Monday deadline. The move aligns with a broader conservative crusade to block any student-debt relief at all.

“The human numbers are abstracted to the people who are making these decisions,” Jones told me by phone on Wednesday, a few hours before the deal passed the House overwhelmingly with both Republican and Democratic votes. In targeting the middle-class Americans who’ve been crushed by the nation’s $1.75 trillion weight of student debt, Jones said, “they’re making a giant choice that affects millions of people — and they didn’t bat an eye.”

In the six-figure world of Beltway political punditry, the deal negotiated over Memorial Day weekend by President Joe Biden, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and their aides was defined largely by its winners. They praised Biden for brushing aside the extreme budget cuts sought by extremists in the House Republican caucus, and McCarthy for exceeding the low expectations of his hard-won speakership. They noted, correctly, that a U.S. default — which seemed possible, given the bitter gridlock in Washington — would have been catastrophic.

The TV elites had next-to-nothing to say about the deal’s losers — the folks from whom Republicans demanded a pound of flesh to get an agreement, and whom the Democrats were either unable or unwilling to protect. The bill headed for Biden’s desk is also a roadmap to who has clout in America’s fragile democracy — the wealthy, the massive corporations, the military-industrial complex, all of whom sacrificed nothing.

“[W]hen a rich and powerful country finds it easier to cut back on the way that it invests in its people, in education, in science, and in making sure that the weakest among them are not completely left behind than to curtail useless and profligate weapons spending,” wrote the columnist Howard W. French in Foreign Policy, “there are reasons to worry about the foundations of its power.”

But what’s even more revealing about the compromise is who doesn’t have clout in America.

The “who doesn’t” category includes middle-aged, low-income Americans, a few of whom will surely — and needlessly — go hungry in the world’s richest nation because of an arbitrary work-requirement rule for people in the 50-54 age category now receiving food stamps. It includes citizens of Appalachia who are seeing the $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline and its fossil fuels rammed down their throats to win one vote: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a coal millionaire. And it includes millions of American student debtors who were sold false promises about the value of their overpriced college education, and are owned an apology, not a monthly bill.

America’s student debt is a weight that falls heavily on citizens under 40, since most of that $1.75 trillion was wracked up in the 21st century, but which also includes a growing number of the middle-aged and even seniors. It falls disproportionately on Black and brown people, and on women. Over the 2020s, the adults dealing with this burden have been sent on a political and emotional roller coaster ride.

In winning the presidency in 2020, Biden’s promise of as much as $50,000-per-individual in debt relief helped motivate young voters, happy to see what seemed like a cry in the dark as recently as 2011′s Occupy Wall Street protests become a front-burner issue. The plan he ultimately approved in late summer 2022 — which would wipe out $10,000 of debt for all but high-income federal borrowers and $20,000 for those from lower-income families who’d received Pell Grants — was hailed by advocacy groups as a first step toward ending the crisis.

» READ MORE: Biden’s big move on student loans only a first step toward making American college great again

But the idea of student-debt relief remains under constant assault from Republicans and even from some more conservative Democrats (such as Joe Manchin … surprise, surprise) who claim Biden’s plan is a payoff to young voters and unfair to those who didn’t attend college or paid off their loans. In doing so, critics have misrepresented loan recipients as pink-haired coffee baristas with Ivy League degrees, when in reality many are ambitious working class kids trying to get degrees from underfunded public universities in places like Manchin’s West Virginia.

Those with college debt can’t help but feel the tide is turning against their cause before they could even taste partial victory. In a matter of days, there is a good chance that the conservative U.S. Supreme Court will side with Republican attorneys general who’d sued to block Biden’s relief plan. The Senate, with Manchin, along with another Democrat and now-independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona joining a united GOP, is about to send legislation killing the loan cancellation to the desk of Biden, who will veto it. The Biden administration also notes that the debt-ceiling deal beat back an initial demand from Republicans to kill his plan.

That’s small consolation for debt-relief advocates. They face the demoralizing prospect that by late August — when debt payments are now mandated to resume, on top of a possible loss at the Supreme Court — that America’s college-loan recipients will be right back where they started from. The Biden administration had extended the COVID-era payment pause when the relief plan was blocked in the lower courts — but that option is gone now.

“The student debt relief program is not ‘protected’ — it is in front of the Supreme Court, which will likely strike it down on illegitimate and hyper-partisan grounds,” Astra Taylor, a leader of the nationwide Debt Collective, told me. “What this deal does is take away the White House’s ability to extend the current payment pause if SCOTUS kills relief, making it more likely the [more than] 40 million people will have to repay loans that the president promised were canceled.”

That broken promise is going to resonate with average folks like Philadelphia’s Jones, who wracked up roughly $60,000 in debts after completing her studies at Portland State University in Oregon in the early 2010s, before moving east. Since then, she only saw her balance rise as she struggled on the post-recession and then pandemic job markets; the one time she had a decently paying job, she said, her wages were garnished to resume her payments.

Jones has found some solace in her activism with the Debt Collective, joining two large D.C. protests in 2022 where she was surrounded by others for whom student debt has changed their life

“We were promised something different,” she told me.

For Jones, the end of the three-year debt pause means a return to what she and a handful of activists were launching before the pandemic: a debt strike. But for millions of others, an August resumption of payments will means tough choices between staying current on college debt or the other necessities of life, from soaring urban rents to higher food prices — ending their vacation from those choices that began in spring 2020. When that happens, the question of political blame will ring loudly heading into 2024.

Debt Collective leader Taylor, while angry at Republicans’ relentless war on debt relief, also calls Biden “America’s Debt Collector.” Jones complained to me that “the campaign promises are all being walked back.” There’s no question that young voters — the ones who list student debt and climate change at or near the top of their concerns — gave Biden his 2020 margin of victory and stopped a predicted “red tide” at the polls in 2022. There’s a huge question over what happens in 2024, with ringtones of debt collectors and the hammering of a new pipeline pounding in the ears of these same voters, who now know what their government thinks of them.

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