Remember when the president wasn’t supposed to touch student loans?
When President Joe Biden tried to enact student loan forgiveness programs, it was treated as an unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach of power. But now that Donald Trump is president, mucking around in student loan programs is perfectly fine and dandy—though this time the goal is to hurt people rather than help them.
Trump is preparing to turn the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program into yet another tool of retribution. Under PSLF, students who enter public service—including government and nonprofit jobs—have any remaining balance on student loans forgiven after 10 years of payments.
Public service jobs are often lower paying than their private-sector equivalents, especially for those requiring advanced degrees. Before PSLF was created in 2007, student loan debt would often act as a barrier preventing graduates from taking public-sector jobs.
But now, the Department of Education is gearing up to remove eligibility from any employer that it deems to be involved in “illegal activities.” The Trump administration’s warped sense of what constitutes an illegal activity is exactly what you’d expect. Trump’s March executive order requires Education Secretary Linda McMahon to redefine public service to exclude organizations that work on immigration issues or transgender rights, along with any employers that she determines are “aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” or violate state laws like trespassing, disorderly conduct, or blocking highways.
In other words, organizations that focus on anything that Trump and McMahon don’t like will get yeeted from eligibility for the PSLF program.
Of course, it’s not illegal to work with immigrants, to help trans kids, or to engage in peaceful protests, but the Trump administration doesn’t care. The entire point is to make loan forgiveness unobtainable for filthy liberals. There’s no way that this won’t be used as a weapon, where the Trump administration can remove any organization it doesn’t like, for any reason, wiping out loan forgiveness for employees—regardless of the law.
Contrast this with Biden’s detailed rulemaking efforts explaining his authority to enact student loan forgiveness and lengthy outlines of each proposed rule change. But honestly, it probably didn’t matter what Biden proposed: The Supreme Court was always going to rush to rule against him. Even when the Biden administration significantly narrowed the scope of relief after the ruling, red states kept suing to ensure that students would stay saddled with debt.
Watching Trump pretend that this is about “restoring” PSLF is ridiculous given his behavior during his first term, when only 7,000 people received loan forgiveness and the other 99% of applications were denied. While Biden fixed that deliberately broken process, Trump is wiping it out again.
When Biden exerted any presidential authority, no matter how well-grounded in law, it was deemed a historic crisis and a trampling of Congress. But when Trump throws up a lawless, bigoted executive order, it’s totally fine.
Who needs law when you’ve got Congress and the Supreme Court willing to let you do whatever you want?