Trump Moves To Strip Student-Loan Forgiveness From Any Public Servant Whose Employer He Deems To Have A 'Substantial Illegal Purpose,' Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Teachers And Nurses Could Rely On A Federal Promise The Government Disliked

WASHINGTON. Fulfilling a promise to bring accountability to the nation's most overlooked loophole, the Department of Education this week advanced a rule permitting the Secretary of Education to declare any employer to have a "substantial illegal purpose" and, on that basis alone, erase up to a decade of qualifying payments made by that employer's workers toward the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

Under the program as it has existed since 2007, Americans who spend ten years in lower-paying public-service jobs, among them teachers, school nurses, firefighters, public defenders, and the staff of charitable nonprofits, have the remainder of their federal student debt forgiven. The new rule resolves a long-standing concern within the administration that these workers could count on that forgiveness without the government first reviewing whether it approved of their employer.

Officials clarified that a worker's own conduct would remain irrelevant to the determination. A pediatric nurse who never broke a law in her life could see ten years of payments voided if the Department decided that the clinic employing her, by offering, for instance, transgender health care or assistance to immigrants, served a purpose the administration considered illegal. "The individual isn't the point," said one official within the Department, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "The point is the organization, and whether we like it."

The standard, critics noted, hands a single Cabinet secretary the power to define illegality unilaterally and to impose the penalty retroactively, on people who structured a decade of their lives around a federal promise. Supporters within the administration characterized this as the promise finally being read carefully.

On June 30, two federal judges declined to share the administration's enthusiasm and blocked the rule from taking effect. U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, in Boston, sided with a coalition of states, cities, and nonprofits who argued the measure existed chiefly to punish groups the administration disfavored. The Department expressed confidence that the forgiveness it sought to withhold would, in time, be withheld.

At press time, the nation's public defenders and rural nurses were being reassured that nothing about their debt had changed, except the identity of the official who now got to decide whether any of it counted.