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Don't Double Interest Rates, Demands Large Coalition
WASHINGTON
Today, a broad coalition of student, education, faith, business, labor, consumer protection and school administrator groups and associations sent a letter to Republican and Democratic leaders urging action to prevent the doubling of interest rates on student loans. Without congressional action, on July 1 over 7 million students will see the interest rate on their student loan double from 3.4 to 6.8 percent.
The letter explained the potential impact noting that "On average, the doubling of the interest rate would add approximately $1,000 for every year a student takes out a loan, adding up to more than $4,000 over a four-year education." The rate hike could not come at a worse time. The letter states:
"The national recession has led to weak state economies, which in turn have squeezed college budgets. The result is higher tuition costs being passed on to students and families throughout the country. In 2011, 46 states dealt with budget shortfalls, resulting in double-digit tuition increases."
The letter closes with a call for Congress "to keep a college education within reach by stopping interest rates on subsidized Stafford student loans from doubling this July."
A full copy of the letter can be found here: https://www.uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/USPIRG_Student_Loan_Rate_Hike_Le...
U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), stands up to powerful special interests on behalf of the American public, working to win concrete results for our health and our well-being. With a strong network of researchers, advocates, organizers and students in state capitols across the country, we take on the special interests on issues, such as product safety,political corruption, prescription drugs and voting rights,where these interests stand in the way of reform and progress.
LATEST NEWS
Long Iran War Would Hurt Consumers, But That’s the ‘Last of Our Concerns’: Trump Economic Adviser
"Republicans don’t give a damn about the American people and will continue to make your life more expensive," said House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) in response.
Mar 17, 2026
White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett caused a stir on Tuesday when he indicated that the prospect of US consumers getting hurt by a protracted conflict with Iran was not of particular concern to the administration.
During an interview on CNBC, Hassett dismissed concerns about the Iran war, which is now in its third week, dragging on indefinitely.
"The US economy is fundamentally sound," Hassett claimed. "And if [the war] were to be extended, it wouldn't really disrupt the US economy much at all. It would hurt consumers, and we'd have to think about, you know, if that continued, what we would have to do about that, but that's, like, really the last of our concerns right now... because we're very confident that this thing is going ahead of schedule."
Hassett: "If the war were to be extended, it wouldn't really disrupt the US economy very much at all. It would hurt consumers, and we'd have to think about what we'd have to do about that, but that's really the last of our concerns right now." pic.twitter.com/PVr63QO9Iv
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 17, 2026
In fact, US consumers are already hurting financially from the effects of the Iran war, which has caused the price of both oil and gasoline to skyrocket. Petroleum industry analyst Patrick De Haan reported on Tuesday that the average price of gas in the US has reached $3.80 per gallon, while the average price for diesel fuel has reached $5.03 per gallon.
The war's impact on oil and gas prices has been exacerbated by Iran closing down the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, and so far there is no indication that it will be reopening anytime soon.
Democratic lawmakers quickly pounced on Hassett's admission that pain for US consumers was "the last of our concerns right now."
"The Trump administration is saying the quiet part out loud," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), "the higher costs you're paying are the LAST of their concern."
"Trump's team of Epstein class advisors says it out loud more often than you’d think: 'consumers are the last of our concern right now,'" commented Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).
"Well I’m not some sort of political expert but this feels like an unhelpful thing to say," remarked Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).
"Trump economic advisor says consumer pain is the last of their concerns," commented Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). "Tell that to Americans paying almost twice as much for gas as they were a month ago."
"The Trump administration has once again said the quiet part out loud," said House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). "Republicans don’t give a damn about the American people and will continue to make your life more expensive. You deserve better."
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Average US Electric Bill Up $110—or 6.4%—Under Trump in 2025
"American families don't need a report to tell them that the president has broken his campaign promise to slash energy costs."
Mar 17, 2026
Over two weeks into President Donald Trump and Israel's illegal war on Iran, which is driving up oil prices around the world, Democrats on the congressional Joint Economic Committee revealed Tuesday that the average US electric bill increased by $110, or 6.4%, last year.
The Democratic JEC staff compared monthly data from the federal Energy Information Administration for 2024, when Trump was campaigning to return to office against then-Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, and 2025, when the Republican returned to power, having repeatedly promised to cut electric bills in half.
The JEC report highlights that last year's national average was "even higher than the increase the committee projected last November," plus "annual electricity costs were higher in 2025 in nearly every state, and were at least 10% higher in 12 states and DC."
The states with the highest bills were Connecticut and Hawaii, which each had an average of $2,490 for 2025. They were followed by Alabama at $2,230, Maryland at $2,220, Massachusetts at $2,190, Texas at $2,080, and Florida at $2,010.
In terms of the largest increases last year, the District of Columbia saw the biggest jump: a 23.5% rise from $1,360 to $1,680. New Jersey led all states with a 16.9% hike from $1,540 to $1,800, followed by Illinois at 15.9%, Pennsylvania at 12.1%, Kentucky at 11.8%, Maryland and Tennessee at 11.6%, New York at 11.4%, Ohio at 11.1%, and Missouri at 11%.
"American families don't need a report to tell them that the president has broken his campaign promise to slash energy costs; they already feel the impact of President Trump's actions every single day," said Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), the panel's ranking member. "But this report is yet another indication that sky-high costs are continuing to rise—and are continuing to hurt American families."
Throughout last year, lawmakers and other experts warned of various policies expected to drive up utility bills, including the Republican budget package, or so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which eliminated tax credits for solar and wind energy.
"Trump and Republicans are accelerating their self-inflicted energy crisis with continued project cancellations," the group Climate Power declared in a December report that blamed the administration for hurting "projects that would have produced enough electricity to power the equivalent of 13 million homes."
The Trump administration is also advocating for the construction of artificial intelligence data centers, despite warnings that the unregulated buildup of such facilities is causing local electricity costs to soar, plus threatening nearby communities and the global climate.
There's also US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, which are not only exacerbating the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency but also pushing up energy prices for Americans, as Public Citizen detailed in a December report. The watchdog noted that "1 in 6 Americans—21 million households—are behind on their energy bills," which "are rising at twice the rate of inflation."
"Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have acted as global gas salesmen, traveling to Europe to push exports and gut European methane regulations while attacking mainstream climate science," Tyson Slocum, report author and director of the Public Citizen's Energy Program, said at the time. "Meanwhile, Trump has done nothing to keep prices down at home."
The report preceded Big Oil-backed Trump launching a war on Iran without congressional authorization. While causing oil prices to skyrocket, his Operation Epic Fury is expected to boost the US LNG industry, with one expert projecting earlier this month that American companies could see up to $20 billion per month in windfall profits if the global market is deprived of Qatari gas until the summer.
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'Things Are Not Okay': US Threatens to Withhold HIV Funding Unless Zambia Allows Plunder of Its Minerals
"The State Department is threatening Zambia with an embargo on essential medicines in order to plunder its minerals," said one HIV prevention advocate.
Mar 17, 2026
The US State Department is threatening to strip HIV/AIDS and other disease prevention funds for more than a million people in the African nation of Zambia in a bid to extort the country for greater access to its mineral wealth.
The New York Times reported Monday on the draft of a memo prepared for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which states that "we will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale."
The Trump administration is considering whether to "significantly cut assistance" from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which provides daily HIV treatment to around 1.3 million Zambians and other funds for tuberculosis and malaria medications that save tens of thousands of lives each year.
At the time that PEPFAR was created, under the administration of President George W. Bush, HIV was killing around 90,000 people per year in Zambia. That number had been reduced to 16,000 in 2024, according to data from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
"Things are not okay," said Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan and a Brookings Institution fellow.
Threats to cut PEPFAR are part of a broader push by the Trump administration to wield desperately needed foreign medical aid as a tool of coercion against impoverished nations, whose health systems have been thrown into turmoil by the Trump administration's massive cuts to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year.
According to the Times, 24 African nations have signed memoranda of understanding (MOU) under the Trump administration's so-called "America First Global Health Strategy" in order to unlock some US funding that has been cut.
Many of the deals require nations to increase their own health spending in order to restore just a fraction of what the US previously provided:
"According to an analysis by the nonprofit Partners in Health, health funding under the agreements would drop by 69% to Rwanda, 61% to Madagascar, 42% to Liberia, and 34% to Eswatini, where a quarter of adults live with HIV," the Times reported in January.
Meanwhile, the deals have come with other, often ideological, strings attached. Kenya's memorandum requires it to provide data guaranteeing that no funding is being used for abortion care, and to direct funds to certain Christian faith-based providers, even though they refuse services like HIV care to LGBTQ+ people.
Nigeria's agreement likewise requires more than $200 million to over 900 Christian faith-based healthcare facilities across the country and emphasizes protecting Christian victims of violence from the Islamist group Boko Haram, even though the majority of the group's victims are Muslim.
Some countries have rejected the deals, calling them one-sided and exploitative. Last month, Zimbabwe walked away from a deal that would have provided $367 million over five years because it required the country to give the US unfettered access to citizens' health data and biological samples.
The deal offered to Zambia is similar to those offered to other countries in that it requires the government to commit $340 million in health spending in exchange for $1 billion from the US over five years, less than half of what it received under previous US administrations. It also demands that Zambia provide citizens' health data to the US for 10 years, longer than the deals agreed to by other nations.
But the deal also stipulates that, to receive any funding, Zambia must provide US corporations with easier access to the nation's vast mineral wealth.
Zambia has some of the world's largest reserves of minerals such as copper, lithium, and cobalt, which are essential to green energy technology. The Trump administration says the country has given China greater access to its mines than it has given to the US.
Zambia would also be required to share mining databases with US experts and renegotiate a massive 2024 contract with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US-based foreign assistance agency, to reduce mining regulations.
After the terms of the deal leaked to The Guardian last month, Asia Russell, director of the HIV advocacy organisation Health GAP, derided it as a proposal for the "shameless exploitation" of Zambia.
In February, Zambia rejected the deal, with a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health saying it "did not align with the position and interests of Zambia."
Now the Trump administration is using HIV treatment funding in an effort to force its leaders back to the table and make an example of them for other countries that may seek to go their own way.
The memo describes threats to AIDS funding as a way to demonstrate the "use of sticks" to other countries with which it seeks to negotiate.
If Zambia refuses to sign, it says, “sharp public cuts to American foreign assistance would significantly demonstrate to aid-receiving countries the seriousness of our interest in collaboration and our insistence on tangible benefits under our America First foreign policy."
Zambia has already been stripped of more than half its annual PEPFAR funding from the US since the Trump administration returned to power last year through a combination of foreign aid freezes, rescissions, and budget cuts that stripped billions from the program.
A survey of 76 HIV clinics across 32 mostly African countries that received PEPFAR funds, conducted by the International Epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) consortium, found that, as a result of cuts, many experienced disruptions to testing and treatment, including drug shortages and staff layoffs.
Citing modeling studies, the researchers estimated that funding disruptions to PEPFAR just last year "resulted in more than 120,000 deaths by November 2025, including more than 13,000 child deaths."
Another study by Imperial College London predicted that just the three-month disruption at the beginning of President Donald Trump's second term would result in more than 37,400 excess deaths by 2060.
In a statement posted to social media on Monday, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee defended the threats to cut PEPFAR, saying that "Just like every other country, Zambia is free to walk away from these negotiations." The REpublicans said it was "ridiculous to assume the United States should fund entire health systems for countries that turn around and give priority access to critical supply chains to China."
Russell said that "the State Department is threatening Zambia with an embargo on essential medicines in order to plunder its minerals."
While she said "Zambia’s MOU text is the first we know of that explicitly ties exploitation of mineral wealth," she noted that similar "exploitative conditions" are reportedly part of other nations' memoranda as well, but that information is scarce because they have been "negotiated in secret" and texts have not been made public.
Julius Kachidza, the chair of Zambia’s Civil Society Self-Coordinating Mechanism, said that yet another massive cut in US government funding “would be apocalyptic. It could be quite a disaster, especially to me. And the majority of people living with HIV in Zambia.”
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