WASHINGTON – A group of 10 people at the U.S. Department of Education had a big decision to make before the Fourth of July holiday.
After three days of painstaking negotiations, the fate of a major student loan repayment program was in their hands. Ultimately, the panel of lobbyists, former students, college administrators and experts couldn’t agree on a path forward.
Now, more uncertainty awaits thousands of borrowers employed in jobs the country relies on to function.
The program under scrutiny – called Public Service Loan Forgiveness, or PSLF – allows Americans in public service careers (such as nurses, firefighters and some nonprofit professions) to have their student debt canceled after a decade of on-time payments.
Congress approved the program with bipartisan support in 2007, and former President George W. Bush signed it into law. Following reforms made by former President Joe Biden, more than a million people had tens of billions of dollars in loans forgiven.
As PSLF was recovering from what student loan experts and Democrats have described as years of mismanagement, President Donald Trump set his sights on changing it. In March, he signed an executive order proposing to disqualify certain employers from letting their workers benefit from the program.
‘See you in court’: Trump moves to revise eligibility for some student loan forgiveness
It wasn’t exactly clear which types of jobs Trump wanted to put on the chopping block. He stressed, however, that organizations with a “substantial illegal purpose” would be in trouble.
Based on the language in his order, college affordability advocates began to fear he’d go after employers who support gender-affirming care for minors or the rights of undocumented immigrants and Palestinians.
Borrowers worried their occupations would no longer qualify for PSLF, and they’d be forced to switch jobs – or live longer with debt the government had promised to cancel.
Borrowers worry about being ‘left in the lurch’
The Education Department convened a panel of experts in the first week of July to help craft regulations to implement Trump’s order. If they reached a consensus, their recommendations would likely be set in stone.
But they didn’t. Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit that gives borrowers free advice about repayment, was the lone holdout in a final vote.
She was “really on the fence” about her decision, she told USA TODAY. Ultimately, she decided she couldn’t vote for a proposal that gave the Education Department authority that she and other advocates believed it didn’t legally have.
“It’s very questionable, at best, for me, whether the Department of Education has the ability to remove PSLF-eligible status from any government employer or 501(c)(3),” she said, referencing the tax code for some organizations with nonprofit status. “That alone was a huge issue for me.”
Mayotte and other policy experts spent days drafting ways to limit the scope of Trump’s executive order. Among their suggestions was a process by which any of the roughly 2 million PSLF-eligible employers in the United States could appeal efforts to target them. The panel also proposed a new “severe and pervasive” standard, which could have provided another guardrail to shield employers from political pressure.
It’s still possible, though not guaranteed, that those ideas might make it into the final regulations.
Whatever the Education Department decides, it should carve out protections for the hundreds of thousands of people already enrolled in PSLF, said Alyssa Dobson, a college financial aid administrator who served on the panel with Mayotte.
“They really are making life decisions based off of something that they believe is available,” she said in an interview. “And then it just gets pulled out from under them. That’s not right, in my opinion.”
In a statement, James Bergeron, the acting under secretary at the Education Department, said that although the committee was unable to reach consensus, it still “helped fulfill one of President Trump’s promises to ensure that PSLF does not subsidize organizations that are breaking the law.”
Hoping for loan forgiveness
Among the many borrowers concerned about PSLF’s future is Tracey Blake, a researcher in Maryland. Though she and her husband have more than $240,000 in combined student debt, she’s just two years away from getting loan forgiveness through PSLF – if her employer still qualifies to provide it.
“I am terrified that the rug is going to be pulled out from under me,” she said during the public comment portion of a meeting to debate the new regulations. “Picking and choosing who gets forgiveness is unfair, and would have families like mine get left in the lurch.”
Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Big changes may be coming to PSLF. What it means for you.
