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Trump's Billionaire Education Secretary Makes 'Backroom Deal' to Shaft Low-Income Borrowers
Amid a cost-of-living crisis, millions of low-income borrowers may now be forced to spend several hundred more dollars a month paying for student loans.
Dec 09, 2025
As student debt exacerbates the financial struggles of millions of Americans, the Trump administration has taken a major step toward killing the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness program.
On Tuesday, the Department of Education announced that it had reached a settlement with the state of Missouri to end the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program, which allowed more than 7 million mostly low-income Americans to reduce their federal student loan payments.
Rather than setting monthly payments based on income, the SAVE program bases them on how much borrowers earn and the size of their families, which is referred to as an income-driven repayment option, or IDR. SAVE cut most enrollees' monthly loan payments in half and left 4.5 million of them, mostly those earning between 150–225% of the federal poverty level, paying $0 per month.
In March 2024, a coalition of 11 states led by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach sued in federal court to stop the SAVE plan. The next month a similar lawsuit was filed by another coalition of seven states led by Missouri's former attorney general, Andrew Bailey.
In February, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the states, blocking 8 million borrowers from accessing lower payments under the program. Now President Donald Trump's administration which aggressively opposes student loan forgiveness, has agreed to settle the lawsuit, effectively killing SAVE.
“For four years, the Biden administration sought to unlawfully shift student loan debt onto American taxpayers, many of whom either never took out a loan to finance their postsecondary education or never even went to college themselves, simply for a political win to prop up a failing administration,” said Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent. "The Trump administration is righting this wrong and bringing an end to this deceptive scheme. The law is clear: if you take out a loan, you must pay it back."
The settlement also includes a provision requiring that, for the next 10 years, the Department of Education notify the state of Missouri at least 30 days in advance before instituting broad-based student debt relief.
As the Debt Collective, a membership-based debtors' union, explained in a post on social media: "30 days is enough notice that Missouri will find standing to sue for relief before it even happens. So not only is Trump gutting the SAVE plan, they're essentially putting a moratorium on cancellation for the next 10 years with this agreement."
"What Republicans admit is that the executive administration does have authority to cancel federally held student debt," the group added. "They just want to make it so that it will be administratively and practically impossible to deliver it because of this technicality. It's stealing in advance."
SAVE was already slated to end in 2028 following July's passage of Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which replaced it with a pair of less generous income-based repayment plans that require many debtors to pay hundreds more per month. The deadline to switch to one of the new plans will now move up, though the administration has not yet clarified when borrowers will have to switch.
The Debt Collective predicted that the end of SAVE "means many more debtors will likely be forced to default on their loans," which the group added "is bad for millions of families and our economy."
According to an analysis of federal student loan data from the American Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, more than 12 million borrowers in the US are already in default or otherwise behind on their student loan payments.
Since their introduction, former President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness policies have been chipped away at bit by bit through litigation. In 2023, the conservative US Supreme Court struck down the administration's plans to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of Americans, ruling that the plan exceeded the administration's executive authority. A year later, it halted SAVE as well while it considered the merits of the Missouri lawsuit.
The group Protect Borrowers, which supports student loan forgiveness, argues that SAVE is "not a novel use of executive power," noting that Congress gave the Education Department the authority to create IDRs in 1993 and that several other programs have been created since.
"This settlement is pure capitulation—it goes much further than the suit or the 8th Circuit order requires," said Persis Yu, the group's deputy executive director and managing counsel. "The real story here is the unrelenting, right-wing push to jack up costs on working people with student debt.”
A September survey by Data For Progress found that student loans make it more difficult for many borrowers to keep up with other bills amid a growing cost-of-living crisis: 42% of respondents said their debt payments had a negative impact on their ability to pay for food or housing. More than a third, 37%, said it had a negative impact on their ability to cover healthcare costs for themselves or their dependents, while the majority, 52%, said it had a negative impact on their ability to save for retirement.
“While millions of student loan borrowers struggle amidst the worsening affordability crisis as the rising costs of groceries, utilities, and healthcare continue to bury families in debt," Yu said, "billionaire Education Secretary Linda McMahon chose to strike a backroom deal with a right-wing state attorney general and strip borrowers of the most affordable repayment plan that would help millions to stay on track with their loans while keeping a roof over their head."
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Western Hypocrisy and the Gaza Death Toll
The West serves as the simultaneous judge and executioner, the honest researcher and the weapons manufacturer, the violator and the self-appointed defender of human rights.
Dec 06, 2025
First, let’s dissect this puzzle.
On February 29, 2024, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent shockwaves when he informed lawmakers in the House Armed Services Committee that over 25,000 Palestinian women and children had been killed by Israel in Gaza up to that date. Austin, the military chief of the Biden administration, delivered a fact that immediately subverted his own government’s rhetoric.
The announcement was shocking for two main reasons. First, Austin himself had orchestrated the relentless flow of US arms to Israel, directly enabling the very campaign that liquidated those innocent people. Second, the figure provided was noticeably higher than the casualty tally reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza for the same period—22,000 women and children in the first 146 days of the war.
The crux of the contradiction, however, is that Austin’s detailed account of the US-funded Israeli atrocities in Gaza directly subverted the official narrative regularly disseminated by the White House.
The rest of us in the Global South must not simply yield to the role of the victim, whose lives are taken but precisely counted.
In fact, as early as October 25, 2023—barely two weeks into the war—President Joe Biden himself began doubting the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s death toll estimates. "(I have) no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using," he flatly declared.
Naturally, Austin's declaration neither eroded his unwavering endorsement of Israel nor softened Biden’s patronizing attitude toward the Palestinians. To the contrary, US military and political backing for Israel surged exponentially after that congressional hearing. US military and financial support for the Israeli genocide during the Biden administration in the first year of the war is estimated to be at least $17.9 billion.
These apparent contradictions, however, are not inconsistencies at all, but a perfectly calibrated, deliberate policy. Historically, this approach grants the US license to consistently flout its own declared principles. Iraq was invaded, at a horrific cost of life and societal destruction, under the banner of "good intentions": democracy, human rights, and the like. Afghanistan's protracted agony of war and instability endured for two decades in the name of fighting terror, exporting democracy, and women's rights.
The operational part of the equation satisfies military and political strategists. Meanwhile, the hollow rhetoric of democracy and human rights keeps intellectuals, both on the right and the left, mired in a protracted, perpetually unproductive debate that serves to conceal rather than influence policy.
While the US government may have perfected the craft of deliberate contradictions, it is not the original architect. In modern history, this phenomenon has been owned almost entirely by the West: Colonialism was advanced as a solution to slavery, and forced conversions were brazenly justified as civilizing missions.
The West's stance on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, however, offers the most blatant and current example of this deliberate contradiction. A concise examination of Germany's conduct in the last two years suffices to illustrate the point.
Germany is the world's second-largest supplier of weapons to Israel, after the US. Not only did it refuse to accept the genocide definition recognized by many countries, and eventually by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but it also fought ferociously to shield Israel from the mere accusation.
Domestically, it brutally suppressed pro-Palestinian protests, detained countless activists, and outlawed the use of the Palestinian flag, among numerous other draconian measures. Yet, in the same breath, Germany continued to champion freedom of speech and democracy, and criticize Global South nations that allegedly curtailed these same values.
Predictably, Germany continued to arm Israel, concocting every conceivable justification for its support of Tel Aviv, even after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders for the crime of extermination in Gaza. Only under immense pressure did Berlin finally yield and agree to stop approving weapons exports to Israel.
Fast forward to recent days. The BBC, among other outlets, reported on November 17 that Germany would reinstate its weapons exports to Israel, rationalizing the decision with the October 10 announcement of a Gaza ceasefire—one that Israel has flagrantly violated hundreds of times.
“Germany’s decision to lift its partial suspension of weapons shipments to Israel is reckless, unlawful, and sends entirely the wrong message to Israel,” Amnesty International declared in a press release—a condemnation that, naturally, was utterly ignored.
A week later, new research conducted by two top, highly regarded academic institutions showed that the number of Palestinians killed as a result of the Israeli genocide is substantially higher than the Gaza Ministry of Health figures. Worse, life expectancy in Gaza has plummeted by nearly half because of the Israeli war.
Of the two institutions, the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is German. The globally leading research organization is largely funded by public money coming directly from the federal government—the very entity that ships the weapons that, along with US support, have fueled Gaza's escalating death toll.
In all these scenarios, the West serves as the simultaneous judge and executioner, the honest researcher and the weapons manufacturer, the violator and the self-appointed defender of human rights.
But the rest of us in the Global South must not simply yield to the role of the victim, whose lives are taken but precisely counted. To reclaim our collective agency, however, we must begin with a unified realization that the West’s calculated contradictions are specifically engineered to perpetuate the iniquitous relationship between Western powers and the rest of us for as long as possible.
Only by rigorously exposing and forcefully rejecting this hypocrisy can we finally liberate ourselves from the historic delusion that the solution to our problem is a Western one.
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US Colonel Who Probed Shireen Abu Akleh's Killing Says Biden Admin Lied About His Findings to Appease Israel
A top Muslim civil rights group applauded retired Colonel Steve Gabavics for "bravely coming forward and confirming what was obvious to everyone: An Israeli sniper deliberately murdered an American journalist."
Oct 27, 2025
Retired US Col. Steve Gabavics went public Monday with an account he had previously only spoken about anonymously—the story of his investigation into an Israeli soldier's killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 and the unsuccessful attempts he made to ensure the US State Department would accurately report his findings: that Abu Akleh was intentionally shot.
Gabavics previously discussed his experience investigating Abu Akleh's killing just days after it happened in a documentary produced by Zeteo News, but he wasn't named in the film. On Monday, he came forward publicly for the first time in an interview with the New York Times to discuss the case he said has "bothered [him] the most” of any he investigated during his 30-year military career.
In the days after Abu Akleh was fatally shot in the head while reporting on an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raid on a refugee camp in Jenin in the West Bank in May 2022, Gabavics was assigned to lead an investigation into the killing by the Office of the United States Security Coordinator, where he was chief of staff. The State Department office coordinates with Palestinian and Israeli security officials, and was ordered by the Biden administration to review Abu Akleh's killing.
He traveled to Jenin with three other people from the office to investigate the shooting and concluded "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the Israeli soldier who shot Abu Akleh must have known she was a journalist—and therefore required under international law to be protected from military attacks while reporting on a conflict.
They did not conclude that the soldier was specifically or deliberately targeting Abu Akleh, but they determined that:
- Soldiers were aware of journalists in the area due to records of Israeli military radio traffic on the morning before the shooting;
- There had been no gunfire coming from the journalists’ direction that might provoke the Israeli soldiers to shoot in self-defense;
- There was an Israeli military vehicle stationed down the road from Abu Akleh, from which a sniper would have been able to see the journalists clearly; and
- When Gabavics visited the scene of the shooting hours after it occurred, his colleagues wore blue vests similar to Abu Akleh’s navy-blue "Press" vest and stood where she was when she was killed while Gabavics stood where the shooter's vehicle had been; they were easily visible to Gabavics.
Gabavics told the Times that the claim that the shooting was unintentional, ultimately included in the State Department's report, was "absurd."
The State Department's account of an accidental killing would mean that the "individual popped out of the truck, just was randomly shooting, and happened to have really well-aimed shots and never looked down the scope," said Gabavics. "Which wouldn’t have happened."
Gabavics explained the circumstances that led to the State Department announcing in July 2022 that Abu Akleh had been unintentionally killed: His superior, Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, who led the Office of the Security Coordinator at the time, disagreed with his assessment and repeatedly refused to publish a report that explained Gabavics' findings accurately.
As Gabavics told Mehdi Hasan at Zeteo News on Monday, Fenzel told Gabavics that he had spoken to an Israeli commander, who called the shooting an accident "that was a matter of tragic circumstances."
"So the US general takes the word of a foreign general over the word of his own officer, who he sent to investigate," said Hasan.
“My findings were beyond reasonable doubt that this was an intentional killing of Shireen Abu Akleh.”
Retired Army Colonel Steve Gabavics tells @mehdirhasan that the killing of Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was intentional according to his findings. pic.twitter.com/9TbbNWboE4
— Zeteo (@zeteo_news) October 27, 2025
Gabavics also told the Times that Fenzel threatened to fire him as the two disagreed about what the State Department report should say. He included language saying the shooting was intentional in a draft report several times, but Fenzel repeatedly deleted his additions.
He said he and the other three investigators were "flabbergasted that this is what they put out."
Fenzel told the Times in a statement that he stands by "the integrity of our work and [remains] confident that we reached the right conclusions.”
Officials who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity said Fenzel's office likely aimed to "preserve its working relationship with the Israeli military."
But Gabavics told the Times that the outcome of his investigation “continued to be on my conscience nonstop," and said he continued to clash with Fenzel over the US government's report on Abu Akleh's death until he retired in January.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) applauded Gabavics for "bravely coming forward and confirming what was obvious to everyone: An Israeli sniper deliberately murdered an American journalist and the Biden administration covered it up."
"We call on President [Donald] Trump to investigate Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel and any other officials who were allegedly involved in the cover-up of Shireen Abu Akleh's assassination," the group said.
CAIR urged the State Department and FBI to "pursue a real investigation" into Abu Akleh's killing. The group condemned President Joe Biden and his top foreign affairs officials, including former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and former National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk for "enabling the Israeli government's abuses."
"These individuals must never again serve our government," said CAIR, "and should be fired from the prestigious roles they have secured in academia since leaving office."
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