Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

11. Department of Education · Notable

End the payment pause and HEA loan forgiveness abuses

Partially done

340 11. Department of Education

“The new Administration must end the prior Administration's abuse of the agency's payment pause and HEA loan forgiveness programs, including borrower defense to repayment, closed school discharge, and Public Service Loan Forgiveness.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The two remaining objects of the Quote's four have now been read against Federal Student Aid's own library rather than inferred from the Federal Register, and the reading hardens the ceiling rather than lifting it. FSA's Knowledge Center sitemap (16,237 URLs) yields a complete in-window inventory of 270 Dear Colleague Letters and Electronic Announcements dated 2025-01-20 to 2026-09-01. **Closed school discharge: zero.** No in-window FSA issuance mentions it; every `closed-school` hit in the whole library is pre-window. **Borrower defense to repayment: exactly one — GENERAL-26-22 of 2026-03-30 — and it moves the other way.** It announces that "the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has resumed adjudicating borrower defense to repayment applications that are not impacted by the *Sweet v. McMahon* settlement" under the 1994, 2016 and 2019 regulations, and that where "the regulatory standard is satisfied, ED will approve the application, discharge the relevant loans, and may issue a refund of payments to the borrower". Its substance is procedural and school-facing — batched institution notifications, 60 days to respond with no adverse inference, and a separate recoupment process against institutions. That is the program continuing under the existing regulations with its school-side limbs revived, not the abuse the Quote asks be ended. How far the negative reaches: this is a title-level sweep of FSA's complete library, so a policy change buried in the body of a differently-titled announcement would be missed.

  2. Partially done

    The Department announced a joint settlement with Missouri to end the SAVE plan: no new enrollments, pending applications denied, and all SAVE borrowers moved into other plans; next steps for those borrowers followed on 2026-03-27. Two of the Quote's four named objects are untouched — no rulemaking, guidance or settlement in the window narrows borrower defense to repayment or closed school discharge, and neither appears anywhere on the Department's active Unified Agenda.

  3. Partially done

    On Public Service Loan Forgiveness, the Department narrowed rather than ended the program: the final rule excludes employers with a substantial illegal purpose, effective 2026-07-01. PSLF itself survives, and Congress extended it to the new Repayment Assistance Plan in Public Law 119-21 (see #889).

  4. Partially done

    The Department ended the zero-interest “litigation forbearance” for the roughly 7.7 million borrowers parked in the SAVE plan, restarting interest accrual on 2025-08-01 and directing them into a legal repayment plan.

  5. Partially done

    Federal Student Aid announced it would resume collections on the defaulted portfolio on 2025-05-05 — the first collections since March 2020 — restarting the Treasury Offset Program and, later in the summer, administrative wage garnishment. This ends the collections half of the payment pause the Quote names.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • One negative search covered this ask and #854 and #856.
  • reginfo.gov, ED’s whole active Unified Agenda (19 entries): the only student-aid entries are 1840-AE00 (Rescinding the SAVE Plan, prerule) and 1840-AE04 (Addressing Title IV Eligibility Issues — change of ownership, cash management, 90/10, program length). Neither borrower defense nor closed school discharge is on it.
  • ED Federal Register notices 2025-01-20 → 2026-08-28 mentioning borrower defense: only an information-collection request for the Borrower Defense to Loan Repayment Universal Forms (2025-08857), i.e. the program continuing.
  • Corrected on 2026-09-03: the Federal Student Aid knowledge-center library on fsapartners.ed.gov is searchable after all, just not through its search box. The search box’s results are drawn in the browser and the page itself carries none of them (a real query and a nonsense one return the same page apart from the echoed term), but the library’s lists by document type are built on the server and return real dated links, and the site’s sitemap lists all 16,237 library addresses, each carrying the document’s type, date and title.
  • Other in-window FSA issuances near this item’s neighborhood, none of them on the two open objects: 2025-04-07 and 2025-07-30 (total and permanent disability discharge servicing and transfers), 2025-05-05 and 2026-02-18 (default prevention), 2026-03-27 (Return of Title IV Funds regulations effective 2026-07-01), 2026-05-20 (Working Families Tax Cuts Act final regulations), 2026-06-26 (institutional authority to set program-level loan limits), 2026-01-06 and 2026-05-21 (OBBBA training).
Action
eliminate
Object
Student loan payment pause and HEA loan forgiveness programs
ID
855