President Donald Trump's Education department is yanking credits for thousands of student loan borrowers and claiming "coding errors" are to blame, according to a new report.
The Trump administration is rolling back credits given to teachers, nurses, and nonprofit workers who might see the remainder of their student debt forgiven if they stay on top of their payments and meet other criteria, Politico reported Sunday.
"Playing games with people's payment counts is profoundly cruel," Julia Barnard, the former student loan ombudsman for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told Politico. The Education Department should "hold borrowers harmless for errors they had nothing to do with."
An anonymous insider told Politico about the rollback of debt relief from the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which former President Joe Biden expanded.
The Trump administration described the rollback as a correction of various "coding errors" left over by the Biden administration, but a former Federal Student Aid staffer said those errors were created because the Biden administration struggled to fix underlying data issues, Politico reported.
"These errors resulted in inaccurate payment counts for some borrowers," Education Department spokesperson Ellen Keast told Politico in a statement. "Like other missteps caused by the previous Administration, FSA has resolved the issue and already notified the vast majority of affected borrowers of updates to their payment counts."
Politico noted that thousands could be impacted, but the Education Department didn't reveal an exact number.
"Borrowers who could see the light at the end of the tunnel are now being forced to pay more and defer their dreams for months and years on end," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
"The Department of Education needs to ensure no public service worker pays the price for someone else's mistake," Weingarten told Politico. "If they don't, we will look at every legal option — including litigation — to make our members whole."