The Trump administration has reached a joint settlement with seven states that will effectively shut down a key Biden-era student loan relief program.

John Yang looks at what's behind the change and what it could mean for borrowers in the months ahead. John?

Omna, it's called saving on valuable education or save.

It bases borrowers monthly payments on their incomes and provides a faster

path to loan cancellation. The Trump Education Department doesn't like it. Instead, it's created

several other repayment options, and with this proposed settlement of a lawsuit brought by seven

Republican states, they're ending it. But what about the roughly 7 million people currently enrolled in it?

Danielle Douglas Gabriel is the Washington Post National Higher Education Reporter.

Daniel, let's start with save.

This program that is going away, or if the judge approves it's going away,

what made it so attractive and what made it

so generous for borrowers? So, John, first, thank you for having me. And with Save, it is an

income-driven repayment plan, one of four that the government offers. What makes it different from

the other existing income-driven payment plans, that some dating back two two decades is that save has a higher threshold

for how much of your disposable income gets counted in the calculation for your monthly bill.

So for a lot of people, that means that they saw their monthly payments go down pretty dramatically.

It also has a faster path to debt cancellation, meaning that if you borrowed less than $12,000

from the government and have been in repayment for 10 years, your remaining balance would be

forgiven. And when it was implemented back in October of 2003, about 400,000 people saw their

student loans forgiven as a result of this provision. While that cancellation

provision became the point of contention for the states that filed this lawsuit several months

later, as they said that the Biden administration had exceeded its authority by offering this

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