Education Department Ruins Loan Forgiveness
The Department of Education is moving ahead with plans to make it vastly more difficult for pro-trans Americans to receive loan forgiveness. Assuming the department continues existing at all.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Are you a queer American? Do you have student loan debt? Were you hoping to see that debt forgiven under a ten year long payment program established by the federal government? I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you…
Okay, here’s a quick rundown: The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, part of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, is supposed to give Americans with student loan debt the opportunity to have that debt forgiven if they work in certain fields or with specific kinds of organizations and have made ten years’ worth of payments on their loans, or 120 payments. In particular, people who work for state or federal government or non-profits are theoretically eligible to receive student loan forgiveness… as long as their work doesn’t involve helping transgender people.
As reported by Advocate, an Executive Order signed by Trump in March (and a plan published by the Department of Education earlier this month) would disallow anybody working in any capacity to assist trans people, for example as part of a queer aid nonprofit, from seeking student loan forgiveness. The Executive Order explicitly singles out organizations that engage in the “subsidization of illegal activities, including illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property, and disruption of the public order,” and subsequently categorizes gender-affirming care for trans youth as child abuse.
The Executive Order also names people who are “trafficking children to so-called transgender sanctuary States for purposes of emancipation from their lawful parents, in violation of applicable law,” which is an almost breathtakingly evil take. Sanctuary states that protect trans kids from the people who want to harm them, whether that’s bigoted parents or the entire federal apparatus currently bearing down on every transgender American, are a blessing to our community and should be celebrated and encouraged.
Of course, even if the Trump administration wasn’t making clearly anti-trans changes to the PSLF program, your odds of receiving loan forgiveness were never particularly great to begin with. Back in 2020, the Department of Education released statistics on the three years of forgiveness data that had been accrued at the time, revealing that 98.5 percent of all requests for forgiveness had been denied. The Biden administration made efforts to expand the scope of loan forgiveness, but as anybody with student loan debt can tell you, it’s still a terribly difficult situation to escape.
Further complicating matters, on Monday the Supreme Court gave Trump and his Education Secretary Linda McMahon carte blanche to simply dismantle the Department of Education in its entirety. Who then will be handling the $1.6 trillion in student loans affecting 43 million borrowers? Probably the Treasury Department. Or maybe the Small Business Administration. It’s sort of unclear, but since McMahon is firing 1,400 Education Department employees, it’s a sucker’s bet that any business the department was handling is about to become even more of a mismanaged nightmare.
Considering more than one in five LGBTQ+ Americans are living in poverty, the obliteration of the department that already struggled to help impoverished citizens pursue higher education certainly isn’t a good thing. Fewer Americans receiving quality education is a net negative for our society.
That said, it’s difficult to say exactly how these changes will bear out. Organizations stripped of their PSLF eligibility will be able to appeal the decision, and payments made to those organizations will still count towards forgiveness until July 1st of next year. Here’s hoping those of us with outstanding student loan debt will be able to find a solution before then.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
