I saw a couple posts recently here in 'antiwork' about student loans and ran across some data to share. I feel it explains WHY the government can't deal with the problem; it is too big.
The Forbes chart (below) shows the real status of 'student loans' in 2023. 500,000 people are in repayment on $16 billion. 29 million people are in forbearance or default of over $1 trillion dollars. In reality, forbearance equals default so all they are doing is playing word games to pass the unimaginably large disaster into the future. IMO, writing off $1 trillion could cause an 'economic collapse' so they just shuffle it along.
In-school $118 billion 6.4 million people
Grace period $41 billion 1.6 million
Repayment $16 billion 0.5 million
Deferment $113 billion 3.1 million
Forbearance $968 billion 24 million
Default $112 billion 5.1 million