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student loans
'Shameful': Trump Threatens to Redirect Student Loan Borrowers to Most Expensive Repayment Plans
More than 7 million borrowers booted from a Biden-era loan forgiveness program will have to quickly switch to a new plan using a system that's been backed up for months.
Mar 27, 2026
After axing a Biden-era student loan repayment program, the Trump administration is threatening to kick its millions of mostly low-income beneficiaries onto the government's most expensive plan unless they switch to a new one quickly.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that the Department of Education was beginning to email the more than 7 million people enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program, telling them they needed to change their plan within the next 90 days.
Around 4.5 million of those borrowers earn incomes between 150% and 225%, allowing them to qualify for zero-dollar monthly payments under SAVE, which the Trump administration effectively killed in December after settling with Republican states who'd brought lawsuits against the program under former President Joe Biden.
Anonymous officials told The Post that those who do not switch plans within three months of receiving the email will automatically be re-enrolled in the Standard Plan. Unlike SAVE, which is income-based, the Standard plan has borrowers pay a fixed rate over 10 years.
Standard typically carries the highest monthly payments, and those transitioning to it from SAVE could pay more than $300 extra per month in some cases, with the poorest borrowers seeing the sharpest increases.
While 90 days may seem like plenty of time to switch to a less expensive repayment plan, it's not nearly that simple.
Due to the large exodus of borrowers, the Department of Education has struggled to process all the forms, processing only about 250,000 per month. Many borrowers who have tried to transition have found themselves waiting months for a reply.
To make matters more confusing, many of these borrowers will have to switch programs again soon, since all but one repayment program will be dissolved on July 1, 2028 as a result of last year's Republican budget law. The remaining plan will also be income-driven, though it is still expected to cost borrowers more each month.
According to a report released last month by the Century Foundation and Protect Borrowers, two groups that support loan forgiveness, nearly 9 million student loan borrowers are in default. During Trump's first year back in office, the student loan delinquency rate jumped from roughly zero to 25%, which it called "precedent-shattering."
"Much of the rise in delinquencies can be linked to the Trump administration’s actions aimed at increasing student loan payments," the report said. “The US Department of Education blocked borrowers from accessing more affordable payments through income-driven plans, having ordered a stoppage in application processing for three months and mass-denying 328,000 applications in August 2025. As of December 31, 2025, a warehouse’s worth of 734,000 applications sat unprocessed.”
Being in default has major ramifications for borrowers' finances. Those with delinquent loans saw their credit scores decrease by an average of 57 points during the first three quarters of 2025, dragging around 2 million of them into "subprime" territory, which forces them to pay thousands of dollars more for auto and personal loans and makes them more likely to have difficulty finding housing and employment.
The report estimated that if those booted from SAVE defaulted at the same rate as other borrowers, the number of student loan borrowers in distress could rise as high as 17 million.
According to Protect Borrowers, the typical family will pay more than $3,000 per year in additional costs as a result of the end of SAVE.
The end of SAVE comes as oil shocks caused by Trump's war in Iran have spiked gas prices and threaten to raise them throughout the economy, adding to the already elevated costs of food, housing, and transportation resulting from the president's aggressive tariff regime.
"In the middle of an affordability crisis driven by Donald Trump," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), "Trump is killing a plan that lowers student loan costs. It's shameful."
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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.
Dec 16, 2025
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.
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Trump Plan to Privatize Student Loans Denounced as ‘Giveaway to Wealthy Insiders’
"By selling parts of the federal student loan portfolio, the Trump administration may seek to unlawfully strip borrowers of their legally guaranteed protections," wrote a group of more than 40 Democratic lawmakers.
Nov 18, 2025
Dozens of Democratic lawmakers in the US House and Senate warned Monday that the Trump administration's reported push to sell off the federal government's massive student portfolio to the private market would be disastrous for borrowers and a "lucrative giveaway" to predatory corporations.
The lawmakers, led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Senate and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) in the House, pointed with alarm to recent reports indicating that Treasury and Education Department officials have met repeatedly with finance industry executives for the purpose of valuing the federal government's student loan portfolio, which is believed to be worth around $1.7 trillion.
"By selling parts of the federal student loan portfolio, the Trump administration may seek to unlawfully strip borrowers of their legally guaranteed protections," the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. "As experts have explained, private investors' 'interest would likely be to squeeze as much profit from the repayment as they could.' Those profits would likely come at the expense of the borrower via fewer protections and less generous benefits."
Politico reported last month that the Trump administration is considering selling at least part of the federal government's student loan portfolio to private companies.
Though small relative to the federal portfolio, the private student loan market has an "outsized" impact on borrowers, the advocacy group Protect Borrowers explained earlier this year.
"While private student loans account for roughly 8% of all student loan debt, more than 40% of student-loan-related complaints submitted to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are about private loans," the group said. "Of these private student loan complaints, roughly one-third are from borrowers who are struggling and can’t afford their monthly payment. This is because, unlike federal student loans, private loans lack critical safeguards for students and parents."
In their letter to McMahon and Bessent, the Democratic lawmakers demanded that the Trump administration "immediately cease any efforts to privatize the federal student loan portfolio," arguing that "this sale would be a giveaway to wealthy insiders at the expense of working-class borrowers and taxpayers."
Warren echoed that sentiment in a statement, saying, "Any way you spin it, this sale would be a massive giveaway to giant companies."
"It'd be a tremendous mistake," the senator added.
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