The White House piles on to the Taylor Swift presale controversy, saying its student-debt relief website processed 8 million applications in 30 hours without crashing
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images, Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
- Ticketmaster crashed on Tuesday as Taylor Swift fans rushed to buy presale tickets for the Eras Tour.
- White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain compared it to the success of the student-debt relief website.
- He said it supported 8 million borrowers who applied for relief in the first 30 hours.
The White House just delivered the Taylor Swift-student debt crossover you never knew you needed.
Swift fans were in a frenzy on Tuesday as her tickets for the Eras Tour went on presale, causing immense traffic to Ticketmaster.com which ultimately crashed. Ticketmaster tweeted that there has been a "historically unprecedented demand with millions showing up to buy tickets," and downdetector.com showed 4,000 outages for the website as fans rushed to an online queue to secure a ticket.
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain joined in on the ticket discourse on Tuesday, saying that the website to process student-loan forgiveness applications fared far better than Ticketmaster.
"Over my years in the public and private sectors, I've had people tell me: If only the government could work like business," Klain wrote on Twitter. "Well, the team at @USEdgov and @USDS built a Student Loan Forgiveness portal that processed 8 MILLION applications in the first 30 hours without a crash."
—Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) November 15, 2022
Klain isn't wrong — when Biden officially launched the online portal for student-loan forgiveness last month, millions of borrowers successfully applied in a matter of minutes with no issues accessing the website. Since then, 26 million borrowers have applied through the online form. The Education Department has approved 16 million of them to have their student loans discharged.
While Klain is touting the success of the website, it still comes as the millions of borrowers who applied for relief cannot actually get the debt cancellation anytime soon. Two federal courts have blocked the debt relief in the past week. While the Biden administration is appealing the decisions, the legal process can take months, meaning borrowers will not see any reduction to their loan balances during this time. The Education Department is also not accepting any new applications for debt relief as these court battles play out.
Still, the White House remains confident it will prevail in court, and The Washington Post reported on Monday that due to the implementation of relief being delayed, officials are considering extending the student-loan payment pause past its December 31 expiration date.