(Excerpts from the U.S. Department of Education Press Release)

• Over 323,000 borrowers who have a total and permanent disability (TPD) will receive more than $5.8 billion in automatic student loan discharges due to a new regulation announced today by the U.S. Department of Education.
• "Today's action removes a major barrier that prevented far too many borrowers with disabilities from receiving the total and permanent disability discharges they are entitled to under the law," said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.
• The Department is also announcing a permanent change through negotiated rulemaking to requirements that in the past have caused too many borrowers to lose their discharges.
• Under the regulations, a borrower who receives a TPD discharge through the Social Security Administration (SSA) match or the physician's certification process is subject to a three-year income monitoring period. During this period the borrower may lose their discharge if their earnings are above a certain threshold or they do not respond to a request for earnings information.
• A 2016 report by the Government Accountability Office found that 98 percent of reinstated disability discharges occurred because borrowers did not submit the requested documentation, not because their earnings were too high
• The Department will take short- and long-term steps to address these reinstatement concerns. First, the Department will indefinitely stop sending automatic requests for earnings information even after the national emergency ends. This continues a practice that the Department announced in March 2021 for the duration of the national emergency.
• Next, the Department will propose eliminating the monitoring period entirely in the upcoming negotiated rulemaking that will begin in October.
• With this TPD action, the Biden-Harris Administration has now approved approximately $8.7 billion in student loan discharges for roughly 455,000 borrowers.