Please, please, please take note before commenting: These are being forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, created in 2007 (fifteen years ago), which eliminates your remaining debt after you've made ten years of payments while working in the public sector (government or non-profit). This has nothing to do with current debates around loan forgiveness.
Exactly, this is pure PR the headline should be “Government Fulfills Terms of Loans it Failed to Meet”
It would be straight forward to simply pay for higher education expenses directly, with much less bureaucracy and more transparent pricing, allowing for better allocation of society’s resources. But, as always, that would reduce the avenues for corruption, and so the politically viable option is the circuitous option.