Nurses Are the Best of Us. Trump's Republican Party Should Take Notes.
The Trump administration has excluded nurses from a key loan program designed to help those with professional degrees. This is not only a slap in the face to nurses everywhere, but puts all Americans seeking care at increased risk and further harms our broken healthcare system.
Apart from his “concepts of a plan,” it’s clear that Donald Trump doesn’t know much about healthcare. But there is one cardinal rule: don’t mess with nurses. After all, these are the folks who keep our healthcare system alive. My mother and grandmother are both nurses. They work brutal hours under nonstop pressure, juggling complex cases, emotional trauma, and physical exhaustion, while still showing up every day with the skill, compassion, and steady judgment required. As someone who’s led two of Michigan’s largest health departments, I know that if we want stronger hospitals, better patient outcomes, and a reliable healthcare workforce, we have to invest in our nurses and their education.
But Trump’s Department of Education decided to move us in exactly the opposite direction. Under rules buried deep in his “Big Beautiful Bill,” only certain graduate programs qualify as “professional degrees” eligible for higher loan caps, up to $50,000 a year or $200,000 total. And unbelievably, graduate nursing programs were excluded from that list of programs.
Our federal government wants to make it harder for nurses to step into the roles our healthcare system desperately needs to fill? Yes, you’re reading that right. This not only is a slap in the face to nurses everywhere, it leaves Americans with less options and safety in the care we can receive. As a doctor, I know our system is nothing without the care nurses provide. These continued attacks on Medicare and now on nurses from the White House are taking our broken system to the brink of failure, straining our country’s staffing crisis. This will hit rural hospitals hardest, where nurse practitioners are already providing so much primary care to patients.
I can’t think of a career more worthy of a “professional” designation than nursing, the most honest and trusted profession in America. President Trump has messed with the wrong folks.
Your circumstances shouldn’t hold you back from being able to pursue the kind of career and education you deserve. Federal student loans are one of the most effective tools we have to recruit talented folks into the nursing profession and make sure they can keep growing in their careers. When nurses can afford to become NPs, midwives, specialists, and educators, hospitals stay safely staffed and patients get the care they deserve.
Here in Michigan, we’re facing a projected 19% shortage of nurses by 2037. It’s not hard to understand why. Across the state, nurses are facing increasingly brutal working conditions as our healthcare systems consolidate, and the CEOs at the top put profits over patients. In the past few months, I’ve joined striking nurses in Mount Clemens, Rochester, and Grand Blanc who are all calling for safer staffing. And I can’t think of a career more worthy of a “professional” designation than nursing, the most honest and trusted profession in America. President Trump has messed with the wrong folks.
Without nurses, we are all worse off. We know you can’t strengthen the healthcare workforce by choking off the pathway to advanced training. And you cannot improve patient care while putting up new barriers for the very people who provide it.
Make no mistake, this is straight from the Project 2025 playbook. We knew they wanted to defund female-dominated professions (about 90 percent of nurses are women), come for working class Americans, and make education and healthcare even less accessible.
These loans aren’t a luxury. They’re how working nurses, the backbone of our hospitals, move into the advanced roles our health system depends on. The cost of attendance for nurses pursuing graduate degrees on average is over $30,000 per year, which exceeds the proposed annual cap of $20,500 per year. Without accessible loans, we lose future providers to burnout, stalled careers, and financial barriers that shut out entire communities.
We need loan programs that open doors, not close them.
