Former President Donald Trump, a Republican, has won the U.S. presidential election, beating out the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. He’s headed back to the White House in January.
After four years of Democratic leadership under President Joe Biden, which included a historic expansion of borrower protections and roughly $175 billion in student loan forgiveness for nearly five million borrowers, Trump is poised to overhaul the federal student loan system and reign in relief options for struggling borrowers. Compared to Harris’s vision, Trump has a starkly different approach to student loan policy.
If you’re repaying federal student loans, here’s what you might face in the four years ahead — according to the Republican party’s official platform, Trump’s history in office and Project 2025, a playbook for the next Republican president overseen by a conservative think tank.
Broad student loan forgiveness is very unlikely
However, the incoming Trump administration still has power to sway the effort in their desired direction and to drive the appeals process — and he could instruct the Education Department to give up the proposal entirely. Trump would most likely not support the forgiveness plan, echoing the Republican party’s opposition to student loan forgiveness. Republican-led states filed lawsuits that took down Biden’s original student loan forgiveness plan of up to $20,000 per borrower in 2023, along with lawsuits currently circling the SAVE repayment plan and Biden’s forgiveness “plan B.”
SAVE and other affordable income-driven repayment plans could disappear
Instead of SAVE and other existing IDR plans, Project 2025 calls for a single IDR option that would generally increase monthly payments for borrowers relative to SAVE and other current options. It would also aim to remove the loan forgiveness option (under current IDR plans, borrowers can get forgiveness after 20 or 25 years of payments).
“While income-driven repayment (IDR) of student loans is a superior approach relative to fixed payment plans, the number of IDR plans has proliferated beyond reason,” the document says. “And recent IDR plans are so generous that they require no or only token repayment from many students.”
Public Service Loan Forgiveness is under threat
The future of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which erases federal student loans for teachers, doctors, firefighters, government employees and other nonprofit workers after 10 years of public service, is uncertain.
As president and on the campaign trail, Trump has called for restricting loan forgiveness overall and making PSLF harder to access, experts say. At one point in 2019, while Trump was last in office, the Education Department rejected 99% of PSLF applications, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Project 2025 goes even further, calling for the program first introduced by Republican President George W. Bush in 2007 to shutter: “The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which prioritizes government and public sector work over private sector employment, should be terminated.” Ending the PSLF program entirely would require Congress to pass new legislation.
College alternatives poised to expand
Trump has spoken in support of college alternatives, and his administration could increase investment in trade schools, career-training programs and community colleges. His platform says it “will support the creation of additional, drastically more affordable alternatives to a traditional four-year College degree.”
Borrower protections could decrease
Trump’s record indicates that he may be opposed to strengthening borrower defense to repayment, a longstanding program introduced in 1995 to discharge debt for borrowers who have been defrauded by their schools. For example, in 2020, then-President Trump vetoed a bipartisan resolution that would have overturned a 2019 borrower defense rule that made it tougher for students who say they were defrauded by colleges to get federal student loan discharge.
Project 2025 calls for Congress to end the Education Department’s broad ability to forgive loans through the borrower defense program. Instead, it says, the Department should only be allowed to discharge loans in limited situations in which “convincing evidence exists to demonstrate that an educational institution engaged in fraud toward a borrower in connection with his or her enrollment in the institution and the student’s educational program or activity at the institution.”
Pell Grant amount could stay flat
The federal Pell Grant program, which gives undergraduates from low-income backgrounds up to $7,395 per year to help pay for college, has been around since the 1970s. Biden increased the maximum Pell award by $900 during his term — the largest expansion in over a decade.
Though Trump is unlikely to strike down the Pell, further increases to the maximum award are uncertain while he’s in office. Project 2025 supports maintaining Pell grants in their current “voucher-like” form.
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