President Trump's executive action to forgive the student loan debt of disabled veterans around the country is one that caught the attention of many Americans.
The president ordered the Education Department to "eliminate every penny of federal student loan debt owed by American veterans who are completely and permanently disabled."
Well, we wanted to break down a few parts of this action, including how many veterans in the U.S. qualify for this initiative and how much debt would be erased out of the more than trillion-dollar loan debt in the U.S.
As of this year, the Department of Education identified that only 42,000 veterans qualify for student loan forgiveness under this executive action out of more than five million veterans in the country with service-connected disabilities.
That's because they are totally and permanently disabled.
Through certain criteria as well as medical examination and evidence, the VA determines the degree of a veteran's disability through a scale from 10% to 100%.
If you qualify for total and permanent disability, that means you have a service-connected disability that's 100% disabling or that you are totally disabled based on an individual unemployability rating.
The current student loan debt in the U.S. sits at nearly $1.6 trillion. This action eliminates a little more than $1 billion of that debt.
Student loan forgiveness for veterans who are permanently and totally disabled is nothing new.
That's thanks to President George W. Bush who signed the Higher Education Opportunity Act in 2008 that erased the loans of these veterans.
The difference between then and now is that, beforehand, vets who were totally and permanently disabled would have to reach out to those departments themselves to let them know they qualified -- a struggle that was voiced by many in the veteran community.
Now, the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs work to find which veterans qualify on their own through their own records and reach out to them.
According to the U.S. Department of Affairs as of Sept. 2017, there were 725,028 veterans in Virginia.
Out of that total, more than 190,000 veterans are receiving disability compensation. The state also ranked eighth in veteran population in 2017.