During his own 2020 campaign, Biden committed to canceling tens of thousands of debts for every student loan borrower.

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His actions during the first 46 months of his presidency have fallen well short of that benchmark, thanks to a 2023 Supreme Court ruling. But he managed to provide billions in aid to millions of student borrowers, including granting forgiveness to government workers, low-income borrowers, borrowers with disabilities or borrowers who were defrauded by their schools.

The Biden administration also proposed a new Department of Education rule in October, just a week before the 2024 election, which, if “finalized as proposed,” would allow Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to “ waive the entire outstanding balance of a student loan.” when the department determines a hardship” that could lead a borrower to miss payments or default on their loans.

Trump has not yet said how he will handle Biden’s student loan initiatives, and the Trump team has not responded to inquiries on the subject. Trump has not yet named his nominee for secretary of the department, which the president has sought to eliminate.

However, Biden’s signature student loan forgiveness program, the Saving on a Valuable Education program, is already poised to cut corners with Republicans. SAVE plan enrollees have their minimum monthly payments tied directly to household income, allowing borrowers earning less than $32,000 per year to make $0 monthly payments. The SAVE plan also caps the loan repayment period at 20 years for undergraduate loans and 25 years for graduate aid, provided the borrower continues to make adjusted monthly minimum payments.

The SAVE program is the target of lawsuits filed by seven Republican attorneys general. If any of these lawsuits result in rulings unfavorable to the Biden administration, then the program’s 8 million participants could see their monthly payments increase by as much as nearly 600%, according to an analysis by The Los Angeles Times.

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Although Republican lawmakers largely opposed Biden’s student loan forgiveness initiatives, a number of prominent conservative thinkers, including Tucker Carlson, challenged then-President Trump to tackle the student loan crisis.

“Student loans are the largest source of personal debt in this country, more than car loans and credit card bills. This represents a huge debt. This is enough to distort and cripple the American economy. It’s enough to dampen the life prospects of an entire generation of young people,” Tucker Carlson wrote in a 2019 op-ed for Fox News. “If you’re wondering why the majority of Americans under 30 say they prefer socialism, debt is a major reason. Student loans are killing them and they’re never going away.

However, Carlson argued that Congress needed to address the predatory student loan industry by requiring schools to co-sign loans with borrowers, thereby making them responsible for any missed payments or defaults, and capping the total amount loans for student borrowers, as opposed to forgiving any current debt held by borrowers.

Legislation sponsored by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) introduced earlier this year follows this line of thinking and could provide a model for Republican efforts to resolve the crisis during Trump’s second term.

Trump’s wish to completely shuttered the Department of Education will likely not come to fruition, as it would need 60 votes in the Senate to pass it.

But the president-elect could, without congressional authorization, begin moving programs from the Department of Education to separate agencies. During his first term, Trump suggested rehousing education under the purview of the Department of Labor, and several Trumpworld insiders told the Washington Examiner that, as part of a possible federal restructuring by the president-elect, the Treasury Department could absorb the Education loan programs.

As for any specific plans to take over Biden’s pardon programs themselves, experts remain divided.

Michael Brickman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an Education Department official during Trump’s first term, suggested that, without having to act through the executive branch, Trump could simply wait until ongoing litigation against Biden’s programs ends.

“Some of the new administration’s early education policy victories may be it sitting idly and waiting for some of these policies that were never legal to begin with to be struck down by the courts,” Brickman said At Washington Post.

Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, said Trump could also decide not to touch Biden’s changes in a second term.

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“I see a return to what was in place under the previous Trump administration,” he said. “They might say, ‘Look, we didn’t do anything with the repayment plans back then, so there’s no need for it now.'”