Posted on Wednesday, April 23, 2025
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by Alan Jamison
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0 Comments
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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Tuesday that, starting on May 5, the Department of Education will resume involuntary collections of debt from student loan borrowers who have defaulted on their payments.
Leavitt explained that the Trump administration “is officially putting an end to Joe Biden’s illegal student loan bailout attempts.” The federal government has not referred any student loans to collections since March 2020. Leavitt said that the United States currently has about $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, but fewer than 40 percent of borrowers are currently in repayment. Debt can be involuntarily collected through borrowers’ tax refunds, federal pensions, and wages.
“This is unsustainable, unfair, and a huge liability for American taxpayers,” Leavitt said Tuesday in a press briefing. “Debt cannot be wiped away. It just ends up getting transferred to others. So why should Americans who didn’t go to college or went to college and responsibly paid back their loans pay for the student loans of other Americans?”
The Department of Education (DOE) explained in a statement that the “initiative will be paired with a comprehensive communications and outreach campaign to ensure borrowers understand how to return to repayment or get out of default.”
The DOE stated that Congress mandated borrowers begin repaying student loans in October 2023, but the Biden administration did not lift the pause. The previous administration also “failed to process applications for borrowers who applied for income-driven repayment” and instead pushed for full forgiveness of federal student loans – something the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional.
In a fiery op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon argued that Biden “never had the authority to forgive student loans across the board… But for political gain, he dangled the carrot of loan forgiveness in front of young voters.”
“Borrowing money and failing to pay it back isn’t a victimless offense,” McMahon continued. “Debt doesn’t go away; it gets transferred to others. If borrowers don’t pay their debts to the government, taxpayers do.”
“American taxpayers will no longer be forced to serve as collateral for irresponsible student loan policies,” McMahon later told reporters. “The Biden administration misled borrowers. The executive branch does not have the constitutional authority to wipe debt away, nor do the loan balances simply disappear. Hundreds of billions have already been transferred to taxpayers.”
The DOE explained that more than five million borrowers have not made monthly payments in over one year and have defaulted on their loans. At the current rate, there will be almost 10 million defaulted borrowers in a few months.
Defaulted borrowers will receive emails over the next two weeks encouraging them to “make a monthly payment, enroll in an income-driven repayment plan, or sign up for loan rehabilitation.” The Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) will send notices during the summer alerting borrowers of “administrative wage garnishment.”
The FSA will also be launching an “enhanced Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) process” to simplify how borrowers enroll in an IDR plan and eliminate the need to recertify their income each year. The purpose of an IDR plan is to adjust monthly payments for borrowers depending on their income and family size.
Alan Jamison is the pen name of a political writer with extensive experience writing for several notable politicians and news outlets.
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