A long-awaited memo related to student loan debt cancellation is now public in a heavily redacted form.

And while the memo itself tells us almost nothing, experts believe its existence and paper trail proves that the president has the authority to forgive all debt but lacks the political will to do so.

"This offers new evidence that every single lawyer who has looked at this issue — now including the lawyers at the Department of Education — reached the same conclusion," Mike Pierce, executive director and co-founder of the Student Borrower Protection Center, told Yahoo Finance. "Joe Biden can cancel student debt with the flick of a pen."

The memo, unearthed roughly six months since its existence was made public, reminded advocates of what President Joe Biden promised during the 2020 presidential campaign.

"The Biden Administration's memo on student debt cancellation is just a reminder that the President has not delivered on his promises to student loan borrowers," Natalia Abrams, president and founder at the Student Debt Crisis Center, told Yahoo Finance.

How we got to this point

The memo saga began on April 1, when White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told Politico that the president asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to "prepare a memo on the president's legal authority" before any decision.

This came after the president campaigned for the 2020 presidential election on the basis that he would "forgive a minimum of $10,000/person of federal student loans," which would erase all of the student debt for 15 million of the nearly 45 million American borrowers.

After months of radio silence on the matter, in early October, House lawmakers — led by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) called on the president and Cardona to release the long-awaited memo that would determine Biden's authority on the matter. They set a deadline of October 22, which passed without event.

A week later, new documents — including the memo — were released after the activist group Debt Collective's Thomas Gokey obtained them via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

But the documents were heavily redacted in pink and did not shed many details on the Education Department's (ED) determinations.

One part of the memo appears to not have been redacted, which refers to the authority Cardona has that allows him to extend the interest-free payment pause on federal and federally-held student loans.

It also appears that the department had produced a memo titled "The Secretary's Legal Authority for Broad-Based Debt Cancellation" on April 5, mere days after Klain had mentioned its existence.