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Even when the Department of Education tried to make it slightly easier for them, many people still didn’t fill out the application to get their loans forgiven. In 2016, the department wrote

to 234,000 borrowers of all ages who Social Security records showed were eligible to have their loans discharged because they were disabled, and who would likely be approved if they applied.

Of those, fewer than 1 in 10 responded. Under pressure from Congress and state attorneys general, the Department of Education in 2019 agreed to forgo the paperwork and automatically

discharge the remaining student loan debt of about 20,000 veterans who were totally and permanently disabled. But the same accommodation wasn’t initially made for nonveterans until last

year. That’s when the department extended automatic forgiveness to nonveterans who the Social Security database showed met the definition of being totally and permanently disabled. It also

temporarily dropped the requirement of an annual earnings verification, a change it has proposed making permanent. The new rules are expected to be finalized by November, a department

spokesman said. “They had all this data, and you would have thought they could have gone in and cross-walked it,” Lilly said, but it took until now to do that. SOME GOOD NEWS All of these

changes have quickly resulted in the discharge of the remaining student loan debt of 400,000 borrowers with total and permanent disabilities, worth $7.8 billion, the department says. “We’ve

heard loud and clear from borrowers with disabilities and advocates about the need for this change,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. But the new process relies largely on

records from the Social Security Administration to establish whether people have total and permanent disability, or TPD — the determination needed to trigger automatic forgiveness of their

loans. Trouble is, once they hit 62, people with disabilities are moved off the Social Security disability books and onto Social Security retirement benefits. In many of those cases, any

disability they had may no longer show up in their files. People who were not previously disabled but become disabled after they retire also might not have their loans automatically

discharged. “If you develop a disability later on, and you’re over the age of 62 and, say, suddenly you need a wheelchair, you may be eligible when you weren’t eligible before,” said Lilly.

“You might not know you’re eligible for TPD discharge and it wouldn’t happen automatically for you,” she said. “I worry about people who just got missed.” HOW TO APPLY FOR FORGIVENESS Those

people can still have their loans forgiven, though it means that they or their representatives will have to reenter the rabbit hole of red tape. First, they need to download a TPD discharge

application or fill one out online. Second, they have to get a doctor to verify their disability and gather other materials. Third, they have to wait for their loan servicer to give them an

answer. Thanks to a repayment pause that’s been in place since March 2020, eligible federal student loan holders are not required to make payments until after the end of August, when the

pause is set to expire. But after that, assuming the pause is not extended again, they will. “For the majority of people who have been on disability for some time, they’re going to get

discharges at some point. What we’d hate to see is for collections to start up again before that happens,” Whitelaw said. “It’s a short-term, temporary problem, but it could be a devastating

one.”