In August, the Department announced that it would automatically discharge the loans of over 323,000 disabled borrowers. These borrowers were identified through a matching program with the Social Security Administration (SSA). This announcement follows the Department’s 2019 decision to automatically discharge the loans of veterans with a service-connected disability. The VA auto discharge program is […]

A borrower defense to repayment (“borrower defense”) allows borrowers who were misled, defrauded, or subject to illegal behavior by their school to discharge the federal student loan debt they borrowed to attend the school. Borrowers can request a discharge by submitting an application to the Department of Education (“ED”) detailing the school’s misconduct. Given recent […]

On April 30, 2020, Student Defense and the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), with the support of the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC), filed a class action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education (“Department”) and then-Secretary Betsy DeVos, demanding an immediate halt to the Department’s garnishment of student borrowers’ wages, which the Coronavirus Aid, […]

Yesterday, the Department announced an important first step toward fixing the badly broken borrower defense program by rescinding the deeply flawed and unsupported “partial relief” policy adopted by former Secretary DeVos. The Borrower Defense rules were intended to provide relief for borrowers who took on federal student loan debt to attend schools that used deceptive […]

On the campaign trail, President-Elect Biden made a number of student loan promises that would alter the lives of millions of Americans. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, he promised to provide wide-spread cancellation to all federal student loan borrowers(here at 1:10, here at 16:22, here at page 26, here). As we have written before, […]

The U.S. Department of Education (Department) continues to garnish the wages of student loan borrowers despite some efforts to comply with the law. One of those borrowers is Craigory Lee A. Jenkins, whose wages continue to be garnished, depriving her of exactly the relief Congress decided she needed when it passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, […]

UPDATE (June 4, 2020): The Department of Education has provided more information about implementation of the CARES Act.  Updates are provided in the text below. **************************** On Friday, March 27th, the U.S. House of Representatives passed and the President signed into law the ‘‘Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act’’ or the ‘‘CARES Act,’’ emergency […]

As concerns continue to grow about the spread of the new coronavirus (COVID-19), policymakers must act to protect those who are most economically vulnerable and to empower them with the financial safety net needed to follow public health precautions.  One area where the federal government should act is in ensuring that the federal student loan […]

‘The injustice of the federal government withholding disability benefits for people who it knows are totally and permanently disabled and entitled to debt relief is hard to comprehend.’ by Alex Elson Too often, political blinders thwart commonsense policies that everyone should support. That is why the Trump administration’s decision last month to automatically discharge student […]

This month, in a victory by and for student loan borrowers, a court ordered that the Department of Education had illegally delayed giving effect to an important rule from 2016 designed to protect student loan borrowers and taxpayers from school closures and misconduct.  The court’s order meant that the rule—often called the 2016 “Borrower Defense” […]