- Trump has stepped up his verbal attacks on Biden's “despicable” student loan forgiveness policies.
- The Supreme Court's decision invalidating the Chevron doctrine weakened the Department of Education.
- If Trump is re-elected, he could drastically cut student loan forgiveness, shut down the Department of Education and shift student loans to the private sector.
Donald Trump has long viewed the student loan forgiveness initiative enacted under the Biden administration as a campaign ploy, yet he is poised to do more than just reverse it if re-elected.
At a campaign event in late June, Trump called the Biden administration's student loan debt relief plan “despicable” and suggested student loan borrowers shouldn't expect forgiveness under a second Trump administration. He also repeatedly praised the Supreme Court's June 2023 decision that struck down Biden's “unfair” attempt to forgive up to $400 billion in student loan debt. The measure would have forgiven up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients and up to $10,000 for borrowers making less than $125,000 a year.
Trump doesn't have many official policy plans for a second term, but he does make specific promises on his campaign website to “close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and return all education operations and needs to the states.”
The move was a direct playbook in Project 2025, a roadmap for the next president created by conservative activists to “bring immediate relief to Americans suffering from the left's devastating policies.”
Notably, Project 2025 continues to repeat their policy proposals, even as President Trump has publicly distanced himself from them, recently saying that “some of the things they're saying are completely ridiculous and terrible.” It targets some Title IX protections and seeks to roll back some of the equity-focused policies that are based on preventing discrimination on the basis of race and gender identity.
Abolishing the Department of Education and its “woke-controlled public school system” is high on Project 2025's list of priorities for the first 180 days of the next conservative administration (i.e. if Trump is elected).
“Such a dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education would cause considerable disruption,” Jan Miller, a student loan consultant with more than 25 years of experience in the finance industry, told Business Insider.
Budget cuts to the Ministry of Education
The Department of Education administers the Federal Pell Grant system and the Federal Work Scholarship program for low-income students. It also facilitates the servicing of Federal education grants and loans and their repayment and forgiveness programs.
For President Trump to completely shut down the Department of Education, which would require Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, it would limit students' access to education funding and resources depending on the state they live in, student financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz told BI.
Even if Trump couldn't shut down the Department of Education, he could limit the department's resources, slow hiring, delay processing loan and grant applications, and cut programs like Federal Work Scholarships, which provide financially struggling students with part-time jobs to help pay for college.
“If that actually happened, it would obviously be chaotic and it wouldn't necessarily save the government money unless the government made cuts across the board,” Kantrowitz said.
The recent Supreme Court decision invalidating the Chevron doctrine has already weakened the Department of Education, striking down 40 years of precedent that required courts to defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes.
Betsy Mayotte, president and founder of the Association of Student Loan Advisors, told BI that the ruling means the Department of Education will be embroiled in legal challenges to the regulatory language and may be forced to devote more resources to those fights.
“Depending on who is elected or re-elected in the upcoming election, the whole Chevron affair could potentially bring further complications to the outlook for people currently in school, people about to start school and people who already have student loan debt,” Mayotte said.
What a second term for the Trump administration means for students
Under the Trump administration, applications for the Department of Education's Public Service Loan Forgiveness program piled up, and the administration moved to weaken forgiveness protections for students who were defrauded by their higher education institutions, BI previously reported. The former president also proposed deep cuts to the Department of Education's budget and supported a plan to cap the amount of loans parents can take out to fund their children's education.
Biden-era student loan forgiveness measures and his new income-linked SAVE repayment plan are working their way through legal battles led by conservative groups but are unlikely to be resolved before 2025. If Trump wins in November, he could end the legal battles by ignoring Biden's efforts, ending students' chances for forgiveness and reduced repayments, BI previously reported.
“Overall, I think a Biden administration would be more favorable to making college more affordable than the Trump administration,” Kantrowitz said. “If you look at what happened under President Trump, you can expect to see a lot of the same things happening again, and maybe new things happening.”
Representatives for the Trump campaign did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
