Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed on Thursday that his department will turn its attention to student loan debt after completing its work on trade and tax policy.
President Donald Trump’s second term has largely focused on negotiating new trade deals and extending his 2017 tax cuts, along with fulfilling campaign promises of eliminating certain taxes. Bessent, appearing on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” said his department would prioritize student loan debt next, noting it currently lacks “a solution,” but that he disagreed with former President Joe Biden’s approach to debt forgiveness.
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“Once we have finished trade and taxes here at Treasury, we’re going to take on the student loan portfolio,” Bessent said. “We don’t have a solution for what’s going on there, but I do think that just forgiving student debt was unacceptable.”
“I think that there is a firm and humane way to deal with the student debt crisis. And we are going to be focused on that here at Treasury,” he continued. “Because for many young Americans, they’ve started out post-college with the equivalent of a mortgage. So we’re going to be working on that.”
Trump implemented steep reciprocal tariffs on numerous countries starting on April 2 before announcing a 90-day pause that lowered most of them to a 10% baseline while the administration works on cutting new deals.
The House of Representatives sent Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill to his desk for signature on Thursday. It is a tax and immigration bill that enacts a permanent extension of the president’s 2017 tax cuts and delivers on his pledges to remove taxes on tips and overtime pay, along with permanently raising the child tax credit to $2,200.
Despite a Supreme Court ruling that struck down one of Biden’s efforts to forgive student loans in June 2023, the former president repeatedly tried to continue forgiving the loans. The Biden administration boasted in October that it had forgiven $74 billion in student loans for government and public service employees under his tenure.
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