American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten speaks to the audience at the annual convention of the American Federation of Teachers Friday, July 13, 2018 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Jeff Swensen | Getty Images
The American Federation of Teachers filed a class action complaint earlier this month against the Trump administration, related to its student loan policies.
AFT, a teacher’s union representing some 1.8 million members, has said that the U.S. Department of Education is denying student loan borrowers their legally required rights to affordable repayment plans and loan forgiveness programs. The class action effort is part of an amendment to AFT’s initial legal action against the Trump administration in March, also over the government’s actions impacting student loan borrowers.
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The programs AFT is accusing Trump officials of denying borrowers access to include income-driven repayment plans, or IDRs, which tie a borrower’s monthly bill to their income and lead to debt cancellation after a certain period, and Public Service Loan Forgiveness, or PSLF, which cancels the debt of public servants and certain nonprofit workers after a decade of payments.
“The Department’s decision to withhold IDR and PSLF benefits is actively harming borrowers,” the AFT filing reads.
The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.
Class action after government data on backlog
As part of the AFT’s initial legal challenge, the Education Department has regularly shared data on the high number of borrowers waiting to access IDR plans and PSLF.
According to court records from mid-August, more than a million borrowers are stuck in a backlog of IDR plan applications. Meanwhile, 72,730 people are waiting for a determination on their PSLF status.
“The backlog provides evidence that the U.S. Department of Education is not adequately fulfilling the statutory requirements” to offer those relief programs, said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.
The AFT’s amended complaint seeking class action status includes several student loan borrowers who’ve been impacted by the Trump-era changes.
One plaintiff owes around $198,000 in federal student loan debt, according to the AFT filing. The woman has been in repayment for more than 25 years and “has been eligible to have her loans cancelled through the IDR program since May 2025,” the filing said, “but the Department has not cancelled her loans.”
Another plaintiff, who owes around $756,000 in student debt, has been eligible for debt forgiveness since around February but is yet to get the relief, according to the filing.
By the end of July, more than 1.3 million applications for an IDR plan remained pending, according to the legal challenge, while the Education Department has been processing only around 87,823 applications per month.
“At this rate, borrowers may have to wait years to receive the benefits that Congress directed should be provided to them,” the AFT filing reads.