Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) drafted the bill. (Wikipedia Commons)

The bill, introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), if passed, would have allowed about 25 million people with older student loans to pay off their debts at today’s lower interest rates, according to Politico.

The vote comes two days after President Barack Obama announced an executive order as part of his “Pay As You Earn” program, on the social networking site Tumblr, to cap borrowers’ repayments at 10 percent of their income, reports The Boston Globe.

READ MORE: Obama Makes Paying Off Student Loans Possible

The proposed bill was to be financed by the Buffett Rule, which applies a minimum tax rate of 30% on people earning over a million dollars a year; but the bill failed to pass in the senate, falling short by 4 votes at 56-38, reports ABC News.

Approximately 40 million Americans have a total of $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loans; with people 60 years and older accounting for $43 billion of that debt, according to The U.S. News and World Report.

Despite the outcome, Warren plans to keep working to reduce the amount of student loan debt. "Today is a really good day for billionaires. For the 40 million people dealing with student loan debt, it wasn't such a good day. This raises the fundamental question: Who does Washington work for?” said Warren.

Reach Executive Producer Arash Zandi here. Follow him on Twitter here.