Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Friday, April 22nd. I'm Erica Pandy in

Vernalaboodu. Today, natural playscapes are the new jungle gyms. Plus, trouble for

workers who turn their zoom cameras off. But first, today's one big thing.

Signs of reform for America's growing student debt problem.

At least 40,000 people could soon see their student debt wiped away. That's because of

a change announced this week by the Department of Education. The new rule would affect how income

driven repayment plans are implemented. That's usually a plan that gives borrowers 20 to 25

years to fully repay their federal debt based on their income. But a 2021 NPR investigation

found that out of 4.4 million borrowers who had been paying off debt for at least 20 years,

just 32 had seen their loans get forgiven. Now, the government is working to correct that

by forgiving tens of thousands of borrowers loans immediately. And this move comes as the Biden

administration faces louder calls to make bigger moves to cancel student debt entirely,

which currently stands at $1.55 trillion. Danielle Douglas Gabriel is a National Higher Education

reporter for the Washington Post. And she joined us now with the big picture. Hi, Danielle.

Hey, thanks for having me. The Department of Education said this would address long standing

failures in the federal student loan system. What are they talking about? Sure. So these plans

have existed since about 1994. And what they essentially do is peg your monthly payments to a

percentage of your income based upon your earnings, family size. And the idea here would always

to help people avoid defaulting on their loans. So around like maybe 2020 or so, people who are

starting to wonder, well, this has been around for a while. How come we're not hearing about a whole

lot of people getting their loans forgiven. The loan servicers, which are the middlemen essentially

that the department uses in order to manage your loans, they weren't keeping an accurate count of

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