Four senators are taking a stand against Betsy DeVos and the dysfunctional Department of Education when it comes to student loan forgiveness. Federal loans make up $1,331.7 billion of all student loan debt as of this year . Democratic Senators Tim Kaine, Sheldon Whitehouse, Tammy Duckworth, and Maggie Hassan sent a letter to Secretary DeVos accusing her of “significantly and needlessly restricting access” to the public service loan forgiveness program. This program allows “certain members of the military, classroom teachers, and social works, as well as other not-for-profit and government employees, to have their federal loans scrubbed after 10 years of on-time payments.”
According to a story by CNBC “Education Department is failing to provide public service loan forgiveness, senators allege”, the workers a part of the program paid off their loans for years only to be told that their loans wouldn’t be forgiven. After about 10 years of punctual payments, which is a difficult feat to accomplish as a requirement, and thousands of dollars, these borrowers expected their loan to be gone as promised.
Not only is the DOE refusing to forgive loans based on technicalities or outright negligence, the DOE allegedly mislead borrowers to believe that they were ineligible for the program when in actuality they needed to be told where to file paperwork. The DOE was allocated $2.3 million towards outreach for this public service loan forgiveness program. However, if the DOE are denying borrowers who qualify for the program loan forgiveness, then what is this money really going towards? The senators asked this same question back in March and still have received no answer from this illusive department and their more incompetent leader DeVos.
Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/25/education-department-is-failing-to-provide-public-ser vice-loan-forgive.html
https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/