Advocates are staring down another four years of Trump, remembering his first term when he reversed some student loan policies enacted during the Obama administration and proposed getting rid of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program entirely.
Since leaving the White House, Trump has not often tackled student loan debt as an issue but did often celebrate Biden’s losses in court, such as when the Supreme Court struck down his universal relief proposal in 2023.
“Yesterday, the Supreme Court also ruled that President Biden is not allowed to wipe out hundreds and hundreds of billions, probably trillions, of dollars in student loan debt, which would have been very unfair to the millions and millions of people who have paid their debt through hard work and diligence,” Trump said at the time.
The once and future president has made it clear he will not be rolling out a loan forgiveness program, a big change from Biden, who gave the most debt relief in presidential history, forgiving $175 billion for 5 million Americans.
But he added there is still hope, albeit small, for meaningful change under Trump.
“President Trump, before he even ran for president in 2015, he was asking things like, ‘Why is the federal government viewing student loans as a profit center? It makes no sense.’ And he was right then. And I think that if he sticks with his gut, it will serve him well going forward,” Alan Collinge, founder of Student Loan Justice, said.
The Hill’s Lexi Lonas has more here.
