Since the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of federal student loan borrowers have existed in a peculiar grey zone: They're not making payments on their debt, but the government hasn't come after them. Under President Donald Trump's administration, that's begun to change. The Department of Education is cracking down on late borrowers, dismantling pandemic-era relief programs, and, beginning just last week, threatening to garnish the wages of some borrowers who stopped making debt payments.
Who's affected: Forty-three million Americans have student debt, and roughly one in four of them — or 12 million people — are behind on payments. Five-and-a-half million people have missed so many payments that their loans are considered "in default." Compared with borrowers who don't default on their loans, borrowers who fall that far behind are more likely to be Black, to have a low income, or to have attended a for-profit school.
Why borrowers default: Borrowers of all types of loans frequently default when they experience financial hardship, like a health issue or job loss. But student loans are a special case: Borrowers frequently take on debt in their late teens, before they have experience managing their own finances.
Repayment programs and policies also shifted during the pandemic, when the Biden administration suspended student loan payments and stopped collections on defaulted loans. "So many people have become accustomed to not paying these loans back," said Chris Quintana, an investigative reporter at USA Today who covers higher education.
How Trump is cracking down: The Trump administration wants to change that norm — and has already started going after borrowers. Last summer, the Department of Education began seizing tax refunds and Social Security benefits from borrowers who defaulted on their student loans after a five-year pause.
This month, the department plans to start garnishing the wages of some past-due borrowers. The administration also narrowed a program to forgive debt for qualifying government and non-profit workers and scrapped another initiative that reduced the monthly loan payments of low-income borrowers, sometimes to as little as $0.
Are we screwed? Many experts and advocates worry these changes will cause many borrowers to default on their loans at once, a phenomenon sometimes termed the "default cliff." For both individual borrowers and the economy writ large, that could prove disruptive. Defaulting on a student loan damages your credit score, which in turn hampers your ability to qualify for other types of credit.
One borrower told Today, Explained that she hadn't made a payment on her student loans, or even accessed her account, in "probably five years." "Now I'm afraid to open it and check again. Am I screwed?" she asked.
What borrowers can do: The answer is no, not totally — all student loan borrowers do have options. Quintana recommends first going to the Federal Student Aid website and pulling your borrowing records, which should include information like how much you borrowed, who you originally borrowed from, and which agency owns your loan.
You can then sign up for an income-based repayment plan, which caps your monthly payment at a portion of your take-home pay, or call the company that owns your student loans and make a plan for repayment. One borrower in Seattle told Vox that he and his wife reduced their monthly payment by $100 with a new repayment plan.
If your student debt is still unmanageable, there is another path that's been in the news lately: declaring bankruptcy. Recent changes to the bankruptcy process make it easier and more straightforward for borrowers to discharge their student debt. It's still an unusual move, said Jason Iuliano, a professor of law at the University of Utah, but it's not an "unduly expensive" or complicated process. In a recent analysis, Iuliano found that 87 percent of borrowers who attempted to discharge their student debt in bankruptcy won those cases.
