More than a year after President Donald Trump pushed through horrible legislation he misnamed the One Big Beautiful Bill, millions of Americans with student loan debt will soon start paying a big bill of their own. A provision in last year’s law that changed how those borrowers repay their student loans will, by our estimate, mean more than $4,000 per year in extra costs for a typical family of four with student debt. Those ballooning payments are a reminder that Trump’s legislation was a betrayal, including of many people who voted him back into office.
The law does three things to wreck the finances of families with student loan debt.
The law does three things to wreck the finances of families with student loan debt First, it creates the “Repayment Assistance Plan” with higher monthly payments for nearly everyone, especially middle-class borrowers. Second, despite Republicans’ claim that they didn’t meddle with the bipartisan and wildly popular Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, the new law makes Trump’s new, more expensive plan the only pathway for the next generation of teachers, nurses, police officers and firefighters to seek relief. These public service workers, including military service members, will pay thousands more on their student loans over the next 10 years before they can invoke their right to have their balance erased.
Third, the law pushes the promise of debt cancellation out 30 years into the future, a departure from past policy that canceled debt in full for lower-income people after 10 or 20 years of payments. In short, because of Republicans, an entire generation that was told that borrowing to get a college degree was the way to get ahead may be repaying that debt for most of their working lives.
The bill also pulled the rug out from under the next generation of aspiring professionals, cutting back on access to federal student loans for graduate education and arbitrarily (and, according to a court ruling, unlawfully) lowering loan limits for teachers, healthcare workers and others pursuing advanced degrees. With colleges declining to lower tuition to fit the new limits, students now face the grim prospect of turning to the ruthless private student loan market that cannot serve every student.
America’s student loan system is a mess. Even Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon has admitted that the system is “broken” and called for a “hard reset.” On this broad point, we agree. Borrowers currently owe more than $1.7 trillion — the largest volume of student debt ever recorded. More than 3.6 million people have defaulted since Trump returned to office — one borrower every nine seconds — a wave of distress that will follow them for the rest of their financial lives and harm the broader economy.
Individual borrowers struggling with high payments have few good options.
Students and borrowers deserve a system that can do many things at once: eliminate debt, drive bad actors out and ensure colleges have the resources to educate and train the next generation through traditional four-year colleges and via career pathways. Just like the promises made in the GI bill after WWII, America must provide young people an affordable way to get ahead.
That’s why we’re launching a new campaign to mobilize student loan borrowers to demand better from Trump and Congress. We’re calling on borrowers to share their own “One Big Student Loan Bill” and lay blame where it belongs — at the feet of the lawmakers who voted to corrode the system rather than fix it.
Individual borrowers struggling with high payments have few good options. But if they think they’ve been denied their rights or misled by a student loan company, they can reach out directly to their congressman or senators for help. We built a tool for that, too.
We’re clear-eyed about the chances that this Congress will voluntarily undo the damage it’s done; after all, borrowers’ big bills were their own creation. But we also recognize that America’s affordability crisis has put the heat on lawmakers on both sides to deliver relief for working- and middle-class families .
That means rolling back negative consequences for borrowers who cannot make these new sky-high payments, fixing millions of borrowers’ credit scores destroyed by gross mismanagement of the loan system, abandoning plans to hand over student loan collections to the Treasury Department’s collection agencies, and firing the corrupt student loan contractors still employed by the Department of Education. President Trump can do these things right now, on his own.
At the same time, administration officials should work with law enforcement agencies at every level of government to halt abuses by scam schools and predatory private student lenders that are taking advantage of the chaos and pushing students deeper into debt.
America’s affordability crisis has put the heat on lawmakers to deliver relief for working- and middle-class families.
These emergency actions will not magically end America’s decades-old student debt crisis on their own. Next year, the new Congress should move to expand the student loan safety net by providing long-term relief to borrowers who cannot pay and canceling student loans for those hurt by decadeslong federal government mismanagement of the system.
But right now, President Trump and congressional Republicans seem determined to ignore the damage their ugly bill has caused to the financial lives of tens of millions of Americans. Democrats would make a huge mistake if they let them get away with it.
Young people’s faith in a better future has all but disappeared. They’re crying out for politicians willing to fight for them, and the party that shows up first will win their vote.
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