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The changes will come in two phases — a long-term renovation to make the program easier to navigate, achieved through the federal process known as rulemaking, and a temporary move using the department’s executive authority to retroactively relax the program’s rules to immediately help thousands of affected borrowers.

The disclosure suggests further bureaucratic problems with the management of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which has come under fire from Democrats in recent years for rejecting more than 98 percent of all borrowers who applied.

When analyzing what those projections mean for future enrollment in the program, the report estimated that over 2.2 million borrowers will likely have declared their intent to pursue PSLF by 2026, meaning that only one in eight borrowers will obtain relief by that time.

There are about 1.3 million people pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a program that cancels federal student debt after 10 years of on-time payments for people who take public-sector jobs. But just 1 in 5 of those borrowers are on track to secure relief by 2026, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Student Borrower Protection Center.