The resumption of involuntary student loan repayments for federal borrowers in default couldn’t come at a worse time for Americans already struggling with higher prices. The policy also underscores the Education Department’s transformation under President Donald Trump from a guarantor for quality education for all into a glorified collection agency.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon, in a Monday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about the department’s plan to shake down borrowers who are behind, lamented that the Biden administration “allowed students to rack up a massive debt that is now long past due.” From McMahon’s point of view, her department needs to turn out the pockets of former students because they spent so long without paying:
I am announcing the end of this dishonest and irresponsible policy. We will conform the department’s repayment options to federal court decisions and end the Biden-era practice of zero-interest, zero-accountability forbearances that are pushing borrowers into loan delinquency and default. On May 5, we will begin the process of moving roughly 1.8 million borrowers into repayment plans and restart collections of loans in default. Borrowers who don’t make payments on time will see their credit scores go down, and in some cases their wages automatically garnished. Why? Not because we want to be unkind to student borrowers. Borrowing money and failing to pay it back isn’t a victimless offense. Debt doesn’t go away; it gets transferred to others. If borrowers don’t pay their debts to the government, taxpayers do.
Trump paused collections on student loans during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is he who is making borrowers pay again. McMahon’s statement blaming President Joe Biden, therefore, is an attempt at political aikido. After all, Biden campaigned on student loan forgiveness, and when he was president, he extended the pause multiple times until it finally lapsed in September 2023. His administration then instituted a 12-month “on-ramp” for borrowers to begin repayments. Since that relief period ended, according to an estimate last month from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, around 9.7 million borrowers became past due on their bills.
The Education Department is being systematically stripped of all the parts that help people’s lives in nonmonetary ways
McMahon doesn’t acknowledge that Trump’s ill-advised and often incoherent economic policies are already causing a new pinch on Americans’ wallets. People are already struggling to repay their loans, and there’s nothing on the horizon to indicate that money won’t be missed deeply as the economy worsens. When you consider the racial disparities of those in default, it’s clear that what Trump is doing will hurt Black and Latino people especially hard. And those communities are already fare worse economically than their white counterparts do.
From students to borrowers to department employees, making people’s lives harder has become one of the principal functions of Trump’s Education Department. After the administration laid off roughly half of the department’s workforce last month, the department’s remaining core functions have reportedly been left in shambles. Inside Higher Education has reported those who remain at the agency were left “simultaneously overwhelmed with work and unable to do their jobs effectively.” Even before those layoffs, an official organization chart showed major vacancies in the offices that oversee civil rights, special education and post-secondary education. The Trump administration has threatened massive cuts to federal education funds for states that don’t go along with its nonsensical crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. McMahon teamed up with Attorney General Pam Bondi this month to sue Maine’s Education Department for letting a trans girls play sports, a noncritical issue that does nothing but further stigmatize a marginalized community. Thus, the only major policies the department has pursued under McMahon’s leadership have involved making it harder for some students to learn and more difficult for teachers to do their jobs. McMahon’s inordinate focus on recovering student loan debt makes a certain kind of sense when you consider her background is business, not education. The Education Department is being systematically stripped of all the parts that help people’s lives in nonmonetary ways. Instead, all that’s likely to be left soon is an agency dedicated to clawing back money from those who borrowed it for their chance at the American Dream but are finding their reality of bills and expenses hard to afford.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
