The Path To Student Loan Forgiveness Just Got Longer

The Biden administration brought thousands of student loan borrowers closer to debt forgiveness. Now the Trump administration is taking some of it back.

Borrowers who work in public service jobs like teaching, nursing or are employed at qualifying nonprofits can have the remainder of their student debt forgiven if they stay on top of their payments and meet other criteria.

But Trump’s Education Department is rolling back some of the credits the Biden administration gave borrowers as the agency cleans its student loan data, according to a person familiar with the plans granted anonymity to speak about private conversations and an email sent between Federal Student Aid staffers viewed by POLITICO.

Widespread student debt relief was an issue former President Joe Biden took all the way to the Supreme Court — and lost. In response, the Education Department redoubled its work to forgive loans through other administrative methods, especially if borrowers had been wronged by schools or loan servicers and had their credit scores hit.

To make it up to people in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and income-driven repayment plans who had their records mishandled by loan servicers, the Biden administration gave out credits that brought borrowers months closer to having the remainder of their debts cleared. For some people, that meant getting up to 12 months of payments if they were steered into forbearance, a temporary pause on their student loan bills, instead of an affordable repayment plan.

But in rolling out those credits in 2024, the agency under Biden created its own errors in part because it struggled to fix underlying data issues, one former FSA official from the Biden administration said.

Now, the Trump administration is correcting various “coding errors.”

Education Department spokesperson Ellen Keast said they caught the issues when they were implementing changes to the student loan program as required by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the sweeping GOP domestic policy law.

“These errors resulted in inaccurate payment counts for some borrowers. Like other missteps caused by the previous Administration, FSA has resolved the issue and already notified the vast majority of affected borrowers of updates to their payment counts,” Keast said in a statement.

Keast did not respond to a question about how many borrowers were impacted, but said the department is committed to making sure “every qualifying payment is properly credited to a borrower’s account.”

For many people, that means that the day they have thousands of dollars forgiven is further away.

“Playing games with people's payment counts is profoundly cruel,” said Julia Barnard, the former student loan ombudsman for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Several loan servicers fumbled the transfer of people’s records badly enough throughout the years that if a borrower made an error or had incomplete data, Biden’s Education Department tended to act in the borrower’s favor, according to the former FSA official from the Biden administration and a second who echoed that view, both granted anonymity to speak candidly.

One of the former officials said that while the Education Department under Biden was checking its work, agency employees also got a directive from the White House to forgive loans for public service workers ahead of the 2024 election.

“There became a lot of pressure to just move on so we can say 1 million people were forgiven under PSLF,” they said.

But the agency also underestimated the complexity of the program.

“An implementable version of this policy is one where [the Education Department] would only have to rely on its own data,” the former official said. “Because they required this back-and-forth with the servicers, it led to it being very difficult to implement with fidelity.”

No matter how the mistakes were made, the department should “hold borrowers harmless for errors they had nothing to do with,” said Barnard, who now works for the Debt Collective, an organization of people who have student loans and other debt.

The first group of borrowers became eligible for forgiveness in 2017, 10 years after the program’s creation. More than 2 million borrowers have submitted PSLF applications as of April, according to Education Department data. The program has saved a life-changing amount of money for borrowers. More than 1.2 million borrowers had received $90.6 billion in forgiveness as of January. The average relief was nearly $75,000 per borrower, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institute, a center-left think tank in Washington.

This effort to fix what the Trump administration views as flawed data is coming after the gutting of the department’s Federal Student Aid office, and the teams that vetted student loan servicers and the data they sent over.

In February 2025, the office stopped assessing the accuracy and quality of calls between borrowers and servicers due to lack of staff capacity, according to a Government Accountability Office report. The department disagreed with GAO’s recommendation and said it uses a “variety of other methods to assess servicer performance,” according to the report.

Former FSA officials outlined in court documents that people who were making sure servicers were reporting data correctly and borrowers received credit toward forgiveness had been laid off in the government-wide purge.

Staff at FSA dropped from 1,433 to 777, between January and December 2025 due to the Trump administration’s government-wide workforce purge and efforts to dismantle the Education Department.

The challenges with the loan forgiveness program have caught the attention of one of the largest teachers unions in the country. The education sector has the highest number of program recipients, with more than 600,000 borrowers receiving forgiveness, according to an analysis of 2025 data from the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research Center, commonly known as PEER Center, a research arm housed at American University.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said losing credit toward forgiveness is more than just a technical issue to borrowers.

“It means borrowers who could see the light at the end of the tunnel are now being forced to pay more and defer their dreams for months and years on end. The Department of Education needs to ensure no public service worker pays the price for someone else's mistake,” Weingarten said in a statement. “If they don't, we will look at every legal option — including litigation — to make our members whole.”