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linda mcmahon
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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Warren Demands Resignation of Trump Education Secretary Over Lawless Assault on Public Schools
Billionaire Linda McMahon "has no business leading the Department of Education," said US Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Dec 01, 2025
Democratic US Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday called on President Donald Trump's billionaire education secretary, Linda McMahon, to step down over her sweeping attempt to dismantle the Department of Education from within.
In an op-ed for USA Today, Warren (D-Mass.) warned that "both families and schools will suffer" from McMahon's mass layoffs and transfer of key Education Department functions and programs to other federal agencies—an effort to circumvent the fact that only Congress can legally shutter the department.
McMahon is carrying out what she's described as her department's "final mission" at the direction—and with the enthusiastic support—of the president, who reportedly told McMahon earlier this year that "when we actually close down the department, you and I are going to stand on the steps, and we’re going to have a padlock that we’re going to put on it and invite the press."
Warren wrote Monday that under McMahon and Trump's plan, "the Department of Labor will be in charge of supporting K-12 literacy, American history and civics, and Title I funding."
"Drink that in: Labor Department employees will decide which reading readiness programs to support for kindergartners," she wrote. ""No part of public education will remain untouched by this move. Title I provides the biggest federal fund for K-12 schools and is used to help pay for good teachers and new textbooks all across America. School administrators are concerned that these changes may result in bigger class sizes, fewer afterschool and tutoring programs, and not enough workbooks for our kids because federal funding isn’t coming through."
Warren argued that McMahon, a longtime supporter of school privatization, "has no business leading the Department of Education" and "should resign."
"When a secretary of Education is actively dismantling our public education system, it’s time to reconsider her role in government," she wrote. "When the secretary is working to make class sizes bigger, take away aides for kids with special needs, leave college students at the mercy of financial predators, and make the whole department nonfunctional, it’s time for new leadership."
The senator's op-ed came after a coalition of labor unions, educators, and school districts took legal action against the Trump administration's over its ongoing destruction of the Education Department.
The lawsuit argues the administration's actions "violate the Constitution, authorizing statutes, appropriations statutes, and the Administrative Procedure Act."
"More importantly, defendants’ actions will harm millions of students and their families, school districts, and educators across the nation," the complaint reads. "Scattering Department of Education programs among agencies with no expertise in education or lacking key agency infrastructure will reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of these programs and will prevent the type of synergy that Congress intended to achieve by consolidating federal education activities in one cabinet level agency."
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'Students Deserve So Much Better,' Union Leader Says as Trump Tears Up Education Department
"This contemptible assault on American education must be condemned by everyone who strives towards a prosperous future for our country and our children," said one opponent of the new partnerships.
Nov 18, 2025
Teachers union leaders, Democratic lawmakers, and other critics of President Donald Trump's efforts to dismantle the US Department of Education on Tuesday forcefully denounced what the administration is calling "new agency partnerships to break up federal bureaucracy."
Although the Education Department cannot be fully shuttered without approval from Congress, Trump has signed an executive order aimed at starting the process "to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law" and laid off over 1,300 workers.
Shortly after journalists began reporting on the new plans Tuesday, citing unnamed sources, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon confirmed the agreements with the departments of Health and Human Services, the Interior, Labor, and State.
One federal official told Politico that the partnerships are a "proof of concept strategy to show Congress how this can be done," and said that the Education Department will work with lawmakers "on making these agreements permanent."
A succinct description of so much that this administration does: if they don’t like longstanding, duly enacted laws and Congress isn’t prepared to amend them, they’ll just hack them to bits illegally.wapo.st/4i6ZRr5
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— Heidi Kitrosser (@heidikitrosser.bsky.social) November 18, 2025 at 4:52 PM
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation's largest labor union representing nearly 3 million employees, noted in a statement that "Donald Trump and his administration chose American Education Week, a time when our nation is celebrating students, public schools, and educators, to announce their illegal plan to further abandon students by dismantling the Department of Education."
"Not only do they want to starve and steal from our students—they want to rob them of their futures," Pringle said. "Ensuring a brighter future for our children should be a top priority for any administration, but this administration is taking every chance it can to hack away at the very protections and services our students need."
"Just last week, they went to the Supreme Court to avoid feeding families. And they're still pushing to gut healthcare programs," she continued. "Now, they're neglecting the basic responsibility to educate our children. It's cruel. It's shameful. And our students deserve so much better."
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, whose union represents 1.8 million people, declared that "this move is neither streamlining nor reform—it's an abdication and abandonment of America's future."
"Spreading services across multiple departments will create more confusion, more mistakes, and more barriers for people who are just trying to access the support they need."
"What's happening now isn't about slashing red tape. If that were the goal, teachers could help them do it, and we invite Donald Trump and Linda McMahon to sit down with educators and hear from the people who actually do this work every day," she emphasized. "Teachers know how to make the federal role more effective, efficient, and supportive of real learning—if only the administration would listen."
"Instead, spreading services across multiple departments will create more confusion, more mistakes, and more barriers for people who are just trying to access the support they need," she warned.
Aissa Canchola Bañez, policy director for nonprofit Protect Borrowers, similarly said that "shuffling certain functions of the US Department of Education across four different agencies is a political stunt that will only lead to more chaos and confusion for working families who just want their kids to get a quality education, to be able to pay for college, and to pay off their student loans."
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, also slammed the announcement, saying that "in his ongoing rampage against everything that makes our country what it is, President Trump is now acting on the plan to destroy the Department of Education."
"Short of toppling the Statue of Liberty, there is perhaps nothing that could capture the agenda of this administration more than what they are in fact doing right now: Making an enemy out of education itself," she suggested. "This contemptible assault on American education must be condemned by everyone who strives towards a prosperous future for our country and our children."
Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.)—a former preschool teacher and local school board member—also piled on, saying that "Donald Trump and Linda McMahon are lawlessly trying to fulfill Project 2025's goal to abolish the Department of Education and pull the rug out from students in every part of the country."
"But instead of seeking congressional approval of their reckless actions to weaken our education system—which McMahon has acknowledged is necessary—Trump and McMahon are now pretending that our laws and the constitutional separation of powers are a mere suggestion," said Murray, who used to lead and remains a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
"This is an outright illegal effort to continue dismantling the Department of Education," she argued, "and it is students and families who will suffer the consequences as key programs that help students learn to read or that strengthen ties between schools and families are spun off to agencies with little to no relevant expertise and are gravely weakened—or even completely broken—in the process."
The senator stressed that she is "always ready and willing to talk about reforms to our education laws to improve educational outcomes for students," and urged her Republican colleagues to join Democrats in standing up against the administration's attacks.
The GOP controls both chambers of Congress. According to Murray, "The fact that Trump and McMahon are choosing to break the law to do this on their own—despite having unified Republican control of Washington—tells us they know just how unpopular their plans are and can't win the approval of members of their own party."
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