Most of the debt forgiveness is contractual despite the leanings of the article.
When people took out these student loans part of the contract was that if they work in fields that were for non-profit organizations (hospitals and schools) and your debt would be forgiven after 10 years...
Under Trump, Devoss (former Education Secretary) refused to honor that portion of the contract. Now mostly this was to use these student loans as collateral for ongoing debt increases of the Federal Government.
(The central cause of the junk bond crisis when Banking industry did this very thing)
But basically people would apply after teaching or working at non-profit organizations (like hospitals) for ten years and got told "Nope, keep paying or else".
Also many records of the borrowers were horribly kept...there were literally years missing of credit for many people who were diligent with paying.
So...I'm not going to slam Biden for this one. He actually is doing right and good in this. (Up to this point)
And actually this money saved by these people ARE the more productive members of society...these are the "common working person". They can now afford to do various things that they couldn't before...(reduce more debt, vacations, vehicles, and homes,)
So...the cost to the Federal Government is relatively small...the help to individual citizens is huge. This isn't a gimme to illegal immigrants or aide to Iran to build nuclear weapons...it's debt relief that was supposed to happen but didn't for the average hard working person.