December, 22 2021, 12:52pm EDT
Open Markets Welcomes the Extension of the Federal Student Loan Suspension
Gives Department of Education time to tackle "Too Big to Fail" student loan servicing.
WASHINGTON
The Biden administration announced plans to extend the pause on payment and interest for most federal student loan borrowers for an additional 90 days, through May 1, 2022. The student loan payment moratorium was previously set to expire at the end of January.
A recent poll showed fewer than nearly half of borrowers were "Not at all Confident" in their ability to make student loan payments when they come due. The moratorium will also allow the Department of Education time to make long-overdue changes to student loan servicing, and ensure that student loan borrowers don't continue to suffer from the lack of accountability at student loan servicing giants.
In response, Alexis Goldstein, director of financial policy at Open Markets Institute, issued the following statement:
"The extension of the student loan moratorium is especially welcome at a time when fewer and fewer student loan servicers are responsible for overseeing millions of loan repayments, further concentrating the Too Big To Fail problem in student loan servicing.
"Student loan debt has a chilling effect on the ability of debt-burdened workers to navigate the job market after school--it increases the power of already-too-powerful corporations in highly consolidated industries and furthers the power imbalances between labor and management.
"This moratorium extension will provide critical relief, especially as cases of the COVID-19 variant Omicron are rising and there is ongoing economic precarity."
The Open Markets Institute works to address threats to our democracy, individual liberties, and our national security from today's unprecedented levels of corporate concentration and monopoly power. By combining policy, legal, and market structure expertise with sophisticated communications and outreach efforts, Open Markets seeks not only to hold today's monopolies accountable for abuse of power, but to rebuild an economic system where progress is easier to achieve, because power is far more widely and equitably distributed
LATEST NEWS
Trump Uses Correspondents' Dinner Shooting to Justify Expanding Spying Powers as Deadline Nears
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is set to expire Thursday, and the president is claiming Saturday's shooting proved "the safety of our nation" depends on the program.
Apr 27, 2026
An exchange of gunfire between an armed suspect and law enforcement outside the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday came days ahead of a deadline for extending far-reaching government surveillance powers, and President Donald Trump wasted no time in claiming that the attempted attack on the event proved that the FBI must be permitted to spy on Americans without obtaining warrants.
In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Trump repeated his previous remarks that he is "willing to give up [his] security" in favor of extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire on Thursday—and suggested other Americans should do the same for "the safety of our nation."
Section 702 allows US intelligence agencies to surveil the electronic communications of foreign nationals overseas without a warrant. Since some of the nearly 350,000 foreign nationals whose communications have been collected under the law are in touch with Americans, Section 702 allows for the collection of emails, text messages, and phone calls of US citizens.
Fox anchor Jacqui Heinrich emphasized that "we don't know right now" whether the suspect in Saturday's shooting, Cole Tomas Allen, "was radicalized" by a foreign individual or group, but asked whether the attack drove home "the importance of having these tools to protect our country from these kinds of threats."
The president responded by complaining that former FBI Director James Comey used FISA to obtain warrants to surveil a former Trump aide as part of the agency's investigation into the 2016 Trump presidential campaign's communications with Russia, before saying FISA has been used in the US-Israeli war on Iran and in the US military's invasion of Venezuela earlier this year.
"It's really needed for national security," said Trump. "Iran is decimated, and we got a lot of information by using FISA... I'm willing to give up my security for the military because ultimately that's to me the highest cause is, you know, the safety of our nation."
Pres. Trump, under prodding from Fox News, exploits White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting to push for Congress to approve FISA domestic spying program: "It's really needed for national security…"
He reiterates that he's willing to give up his liberties for safety. pic.twitter.com/tmcepp0Wgn
— Chris Menahan 🇺🇸 (@infolibnews) April 26, 2026
Jordan Liz, an associate professor of philosophy at San José State University, wrote last week in a column at Common Dreams that while Trump, Republican lawmakers, and US intelligence agencies "make sweeping claims about the terror attacks that Section 702 has prevented, there is little publicly available evidence to support this."
"According to the Cato Institute, there is only one well-documented, independently corroborated case of Section 702 preventing a terrorist attack on American soil: the 2009 New York subway bombing plot," wrote Liz. "In that case, Section 702 was used by the [National Security Agency] to track an exchange between an al-Qaeda courier and Najibullah Zazi, who was living in the US. The NSA passed this information to the FBI, which identified Zazi and disrupted the attack before it took place. Importantly, however, the NSA allegedly received the courier’s foreign email address from the government’s British intelligence partners. At best then, this success was a byproduct of productive intelligence sharing between allies. Rather than proving the necessity of Section 702, this incident underscores how Trump’s inane attacks against key US allies undermine our national security."
The suspect in Saturday's shooting is believed to have acted alone, and no evidence has been released that he was in communication with any foreign entities. A document he wrote alluded to his Christian beliefs and to reports of the administration's abuse of immigrants in detention centers, its boat-bombing operations in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, and the bombing of an elementary school in Iran.
The president has been pushing in recent weeks for an extension of Section 702. The program was last reauthorized in 2024, and earlier this month two efforts to extend the program—one for 18 months and the other for five years—failed, with opponents objecting to a lack of privacy reforms and to a loophole allowing data brokers to sell private information about Americans to government agencies that have not obtained judicial approval to seize the data.
After those proposals failed, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) last week unveiled a new bill to extend Section 702 for three years and require the FBI to submit monthly reports on its reviews of Americans' private data to an oversight official, as well as imposing penalties for abuse—provisions that were dismissed by privacy advocates.
The House Rules Committee was set to convene on Monday, a step toward advancing the new bill toward a vote in the House, and according to NPR, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) circulated a memo late last week urging his colleagues to reject the Republicans' latest proposal.
The bill, he wrote, "continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans' data... FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans' communications without any review from a judge."
Four Democrats in the House—Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Tom Suozzi (D-NJ), Marie Gluesencamp Perez (D-Wash.), and Jared Golden (D-Maine)—broke with the party and joined the GOP earlier this month in supporting a procedural vote to advance the reauthorization of Section 702, and privacy advocates are ramping up pressure on them to oppose the latest proposal for an extension.
"It all comes down to those four and where they are going to land,” Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, told The Intercept Monday, “and if they are going to continue to try to hand Trump and [White House homeland security adviser] Stephen Miller warrantless surveillance authorities without any sort of checks or reforms that make sure they’re not violating civil liberties.”
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Billionaire-Funded Pro-Collins PAC Drops Nearly $2 Million on Ad Attacking Platner
"They’re getting scared," Platner said. "And they should be."
Apr 27, 2026
A super political action committee supporting Sen. Susan Collins, backed by Wall Street and tech billionaires, has dropped nearly $2 million on attack ads targeting Democratic primary frontrunner Graham Platner.
Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings noting the Pine Tree Results PAC’s expenditures on April 22 were first reported on Sunday by Drop Site News co-founder Ryan Grim, who noted the firm’s support from a who’s who of elite financial benefactors, many of whom have close ties to the Trump administration.
Previous FEC filings reveal that Pine Tree Results has received $2 million from Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone. Infamously, those funds came right before Collins cast a decisive vote to advance President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which included major tax breaks for private equity while slashing more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and federal food assistance.
Another major Pine Tree backer is Paul Singer, CEO of the hedge fund Elliott Management and a leading Trump donor, who has been identified as one of the biggest beneficiaries of Trump's overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Aside from Wall Street, the pro-Collins super PAC has also received $100,000 from Alex Karp, the CEO of the intelligence giant Palantir, which has provided the Trump administration with intelligence and surveillance software used by the US government to target immigrants for deportation and by the US and Israeli militaries.
The company recently published what many called a “manifesto” based on a new book by Karp, which argued for mandatory national military service and the advancement of autonomous killer robot technology while railing against cultural “pluralism.”
These are just some of the donors backing the new round of ads aimed at taking down Platner before the June 9 primary, where polls show him with a commanding lead over Democratic Gov. Janet Mills on the back of a campaign laser-focused on attacking billionaire power, championing progressive policies like a tax on extreme wealth and Medicare for All, and decrying Trump's aggressive foreign wars and attacks on the rights of people across the US.
As independent journalist Nathan Bernard explained, Pine Tree Results' new ad against Platner "is essentially the same attack ad Janet Mills ran [last month], which backfired badly."
It seizes on a comment made by Platner in a 2013 Reddit thread in which he said both victims and perpetrators of sexual assaults while under the influence of alcohol need to "take some responsibility" for their actions. Platner has since disavowed these and other questionable comments he made around the time, saying, "I did not know what the fuck I was talking about.”
The ad also claims that Platner "bragged about having a Nazi tattoo on his chest." Platner said he got the tattoo, a skull and crossbones resembling an insignia worn by the SS, in Croatia in 2007 while serving as a young Marine. He said at the time he was unaware of the symbol's connotations, believing it to be merely a “terrifying-looking skull and crossbones." He has since had the tattoo covered.
While Mills and other liberal opponents of Platner have suggested these controversies may make him less electable in the critical general election—which could prove decisive as Democrats seek to retake the Senate in November—Platner has consistently polled further ahead of Collins in general election polls than Mills, with one from early April showing him ahead by 11 points over the five-term incumbent, and has rallied crowds at standing-room only events across the state.
"I thought Collins was relishing running against Platner," wrote American Prospect editor David Dayen in a sarcastic social media post. "Why wouldn't she save this until after the primary?"
Platner, who has raised three times more than Mills and Collins combined from small donors, decried the fact that the new ads against him were funded “by 12 billionaires” using “all out of state money” and “not a single dollar coming from Maine.”
However, he seemed unfazed by the attack.
"They’re getting scared," he said. "And they should be."
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Anyone Still Arguing Trump's Iran War Isn't Illegal Will Soon Be Out of Excuses: Legal Scholar
“The courts should simply hold that the War Powers Resolution requires the president to end our involvement in the war with Iran unless and until Congress authorizes it."
Apr 27, 2026
In late February, President Donald Trump launched a war of choice with Iran that many legal scholars have called illegal for numerous reasons, including that the president received no authorization from Congress or the United Nations Security Council before carrying out the attack, and that the invasion was not started in self-defense.
Defenders of the war have nevertheless claimed that Trump's decision to attack Iran is covered by the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which allows the president to deploy military forces for up to 60 days so long as he provides the US Congress with notification within 48 hours of launching strikes.
With the Iran war set to surpass the 60-day threshold by the end of this week, legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, argued in an editorial published by The New York Times on Monday that time is about to run out for defenders of the deeply unpopular war.
The US attacks will “clearly be illegal” should they continue without any congressional approval, said Chemerinsky.
Chemerinsky predicted that Trump and Republicans in Congress will shrug off this deadline, even though the War Powers Resolution "doesn't come with a check box for opting out."
This would then put the onus on courts to declare the war illegal and demand its end, Chemerinsky continued, although he acknowledged that the chances of a court enforcing the War Powers Resolution were slim, given a long history of courts dismissing claims brought under the 1973 law.
Even so, he encouraged opponents of the war to file lawsuits aimed at ending the conflict, given that the alternative is to simply grant the president unchecked powers to launch wars of choice.
"The courts should simply hold that the War Powers Resolution requires the president to end our involvement in the war with Iran unless and until Congress authorizes it," Chemerinsky concluded. "This shouldn’t be—and isn't—different than any other injunction on any administration to comply with the law. Mr. Trump might disregard such an order. But that isn’t a reason for the federal judiciary to abandon its duty to enforce the law."
Congressional Democrats have repeatedly forced votes on war powers resolutions that would end the Iran War, but each time have fallen short of the votes needed in the Republican-controlled Congress.
An April 16 war powers resolution in the US House of Representatives came one vote short of passing, with Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) joining nearly all Republicans in voting against it.
Chemerinsky pointed to the unwillingness of Congress to take responsibility for war powers as a reason for courts to intervene, and warned of dire consequences should they fail to declare the war illegal.
"In the face of congressional inaction, and without judicial enforcement, there are realistically no checks on the president’s ability to unilaterally wage war," wrote Chemerinsky. "If the federal judiciary, up to and including the Supreme Court, won’t uphold its responsibility here, it will nullify our Constitution’s design that two branches of government should be involved when our country goes to war."
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