By Eliminating Public Service Loan Forgiveness, Project 2025 Would Force 3.6M Workers to Pay $250B in Additional Student Debt

In Massachusetts, Eliminating PSLF Would Harm Over 78,000 Workers and Rob Them of Over $5 Billion in Debt Relief Under PSLF

Press Conference | Analysis

BOSTON – Today, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), co-founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, joined the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) and President of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten for a virtual press conference unveiling a groundbreaking state-by-state analysis quantifying the harm that Project 2025’s elimination of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF) would wreak on millions of teachers, healthcare workers, servicemembers, first responders, and other public service workers. Over the last three years alone, the Biden-Harris Administration has approved more than $69 billion in debt relief to nearly 1 million public service workers under PSLF.

Project 2025 proposes to eliminate all time- and employment-based student debt relief and specifically calls for the elimination of PSLF and any debt discharge under Income Driven Repayment. According to SBPC’s analysis, Project 2025’s proposal to eliminate PSLF would force 3.6 million public service workers—educators, nurses and other healthcare workers, servicemembers, first responders and others—to pay an additional $250 billion in student loan debt over the next decade. In Massachusetts, eliminating PSLF would harm more than 78,000 public service workers and rob them of more than $5 billion in debt relief under PSLF. 

“Project 2025 would have a devastating impact on people from all walks of life, including public service workers burdened by the crushing weight of student debt,” said Rep. Pressley. “Project 2025’s plan to eliminate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is cruel, anti-worker, and would deny essential relief to millions of people who have given back so much to our communities, our Commonwealth, and our country. As co-founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, I won’t stop pressing to make sure this far-right manifesto does not manifest, and I’ll keep pushing to ensure our borrowers get the student debt relief they demand and deserve.”

“As our country once again calls on first responders and healthcare workers to confront unprecedented natural disasters in communities across the southeastern United States, the right-wing architects of Project 2025 conspire to strip away their student debt relief,” said SBPC executive director Mike Pierce. “The Biden-Harris administration delivered debt relief for nearly one million public service workers—fragile progress that Project 2025 is determined to erase. We won’t let them drag us back.”

“Let’s be clear, Project 2025 will be the next chapter of Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on public service workers with student debt. It was not long ago that the AFT was fighting Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump in court for illegally denying educators and other public service workers of PSLF debt relief that they earned,” said Randi Weingarten, President of AFT. “Now, with Project 2025, they want to eliminate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program outright which will leave more than 3.6 million public service workers drowning in student loan debt. Under the Biden-Harris Administration, nearly 1 million public service workers have benefitted from life-changing PSLF relief and they are not finished yet. We will not go back and we will not stop shedding light on the dangers of Project 2025.” 

“Like so many workers, I took on student loans to advance my education, believing it would open doors. Like millions of educators, healthcare workers, and first responders, I relied on PSLF to ease the burden of student debt after years of public service. When you’re in student loan debt, you have to make choices. Can I buy a home? Can I choose to buy a new car? Can I enjoy small parts of my life like visiting my family or taking a girl’s weekend with my friends? The Biden-Harris administration’s recent changes to PSLF have already helped nearly a million workers, including me, to get out from under crushing debt. Loan forgiveness has changed my life!” said Catherine Hutchinson, President, California State University Employees Union, SEIU Local 2579. “If PSLF is eliminated, millions of public service workers, like myself, will be pushed further into debt. This is why we must fight to protect PSLF. Working people everywhere, from a fast-food worker in South Carolina to a nurse in Oregon should be able to thrive regardless of their education. For many of us, student loans were supposed to be a path forward, not something that holds us back. We need leaders that prioritize policies that put working people first.”

SBPC’s analysis provides a nationwide snapshot of how eliminating PSLF will harm public service workers across each state. The ten hardest-hit states—those that would be home to the most public service workers trapped in debt—include Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan. See the analysis in the form of an interactive map here.

Pressley and Weingarten were joined by union members who would pay the price should this extremist playbook come to pass. A full transcript of Congresswoman Pressley’s remarks is available below and footage is available here.

Transcript: Pressley, Advocates Unveil State-by-State Data Quantifying Harm of Project 2025 on Public Service Workers
October 2, 2024
Boston, Massachusetts

Good afternoon and thank you all for joining us today.

As I so often say about Randi, I would follow her anywhere and certainly into any battle or any fight, grateful for her leadership and strength of conviction. 

It’s an honor to stand alongside all of you, our dedicated public servants, the Student Borrower Protection Center, AFT, borrowers and advocates to further highlight the devastating impact Project 2025 would have for millions of public servants and their families.

I think it’s important always to make that point, when we talk about borrowers, when we talk about educators, people often think that they’re sort of independent contractors. Borrowers, educators belong to families and those families are a part of communities, and so there is a residual impact felt by everyone.

I am proud to be an original co-founder of the House Stop Project 2025 Task Force, alongside Congressman Jared Huffman, and we are being very intentional about leveraging every tool at our disposal – from the power of our pen as lawmakers, to the power of our platform, to the power of convening through committee – to shine a light, because sunlight is the best disinfectant, on every aspect of Project 2025 and to give the public as clear a picture as possible of just how harmful Project 2025 is.

Project 2025, yes it is a blueprint for a far-right wing manifesto that we have to do everything possible to make sure it does not become manifest. But it is in simpler terms, it’s a playbook.

I have learned in my six years in Congress that these extremist Republicans do not make threats, they make promises. 

So Project 2025 is a playbook, it is a playbook that means harm to every person that calls this country home. 

It is wholesale policy violence.

But today, again, thanks to our partners at SBPC, we now have damning new data that shows how harmful it would be for public service workers.

So it gives us that sort of disaggregated data to tell in even more detail a picture about the harm that would be caused, very precisely, to public service workers.

To put it bluntly, Project 2025’s proposal to eliminate Public Service Loan Forgiveness is cruel, it’s anti-worker, and it would deny this life-saving relief to millions of people who have given so much to our country.

And it is not just an attack on a federal program – it is an attack on the lives and livelihoods of those who strengthen our communities and build up our nation.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness was designed to provide relief to those who dedicate their lives to public service—our educators, our nurses, our healthcare workers, servicemembers, first responders, and more.

Our public service workers make many sacrifices to stay in their field, answering what I think is a higher and a deep calling.

And Project 2025 seeks to gut this program that is essential to retaining dedicated people.

Now if enacted, this plan, this playbook, would strip away a critical pathway to student debt relief from approximately 3.6 million public service workers and saddle them with over 250 billion dollars in additional student loan debt.

That’s 250 billion dollars in debt on the backs of those who have already sacrificed so much for so many.

In my home state, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, roughly 78 thousand public service workers would lose out on more than 5 billion dollars in debt relief.

These are the people who show up, day in and day out, who certainly did that ten-fold during the pandemic, whether it’s the educator in the classroom teaching our babies, the nurse caring for us at our bedside, or the first responder running towards danger.

These workers are the backbones of our communities, and they deserve a government that sees them, that centers them, that invests in them. But Project 2025 is telling them that their contributions don’t matter.

It is as heartless as it is wrong. And again, as I’ve learned with these extremists Republicans, the cruelty is the point. It seems to be the only point.

You know, there are so many stories and lived experiences that I carry with me in this fight, in this work, specific to student debt and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

And I’m thinking specifically, in this moment, of Priscilla Valentine – a first generation American, a proud union educator with Boston Public Schools and the Boston Teachers Union, and my guest, it was my honor, my guest at President Biden’s State of the Union Address this year.

Now, Priscilla, she took out loans to pursue her goal of becoming a teacher. But like so many borrowers, she was saddled with debt that impacted her credit score and her life for years, and that of her family. 

As a last hope, Priscilla applied for PSLF, and ultimately had her entire student loan balance of over $117,000 wiped out.

In her words, PSLF, “opened up my family’s world to a life that I could have only dreamed of a year ago. I am now able to save for my children to be able to go to college, and I’m building good credit so my husband and I can refinance our mortgage.” 

PSLF has given people like Priscilla a pathway to financial stability and allowed them to continue serving our communities.

When we talk about economic justice, when we talk about economic freedom, it’s a peace of mind that you and yours are going to be okay. 

And since the Biden-Harris Administration fixed the program in 2021, we’ve seen over $69 billion in student debt cancelled for nearly 1 million public service workers nationwide.

This is how government is supposed to work. We’re supposed to be responsive to the struggles and the aspirations of everyone who calls this country home.

But perhaps most importantly, in addition to this critical relief, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program has given borrowers hope.

Under Project 2025, Priscilla and millions of others would be denied that hope, would be denied that relief.

So stopping Project 2025 is as much about protecting our fundamental freedoms and our democracy as it is about advancing workers’ justice and economic justice, and gender justice, and racial justice.

So thank you again to everyone for joining us today and thank you to our partners for this important work.

Together, we are going to do everything in our power to ensure that this far-right-wing manifesto does not become manifest.

And we are going to keep pushing to ensure that every last borrower receives the student debt relief that they demand and that they deserve.

Rep. Pressley has been a leading voice in Congress urging President Biden to cancel student debt. Following years of advocacy by Rep. Pressley—in partnership with colleagues, borrowers, and advocates—the Biden-Harris Administration announced a historic plan to cancel student debt that stands to benefit over 40 million people. She has consistently helped borrowers access student debt cancellation resources, including PSLF, and she was proud to welcome a union educator and PSLF recipient as her guest to President Biden’s State of the Union Address in March.

Rep. Pressley is a founding member of a Congressional Task Force designed to stop Project 2025, a thousand-page blueprint for Donald Trump to seize “supreme” powers and radically undermine reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ equality, racial justice, free speech, and other democratic institutions and freedoms. The Task Force was announced by Rep. Huffman in June and its members are leaders on many of the issues currently under attack by Project 2025.

As a member of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Pressley has repeatedly sounded the alarm on Project 2025, a bucket list extremist policies that would uproot every government agency and disrupt the lives of every person who calls America home.

• On September 24, 2024, Rep. Pressley joined House Democratic Leadership and her colleagues on the Steering and Policy Committee to hold a historic hearing on Trump’s Project 2025 and its devastating impact on families across America.
• On September 19, 2024, Rep. Pressley and Rep. Huffman launched a confidential tip line and encouraging members of the public to come forward with any information about the hidden “Fourth Pillar” of Project 2025.
• On August 6, 2024, Rep. Pressley and Rep. Huffman wrote to Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, requesting that he come before Congress to discuss Project 2025 and release its undisclosed “180-Day Playbook.”
• On July 30, 2024, Rep. Pressley issued a statement on reports that Paul Dans is stepping down from his role as the head of Project 2025.
• On June 27, 2024, Rep. Pressley discussed the importance of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which combats discrimination in the workplace, and sharply criticized the harmful impact that far-right manifesto Project 2025 would have on the Department of Labor, the EEOC, and vulnerable workers.
• On June 17, 2024, Rep. Pressley joined Rep. Jared Huffman on a letter decrying the FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr for crafting part of Project 2025 in his official capacity as an executive-level employee of the federal government.
• On June 14, Rep. Pressley was announced as a founding member of a Congressional Task Force designed to stop Project 2025 which was founded by Rep. Jared Huffman (CA-02).
• On June 12, 2024, Rep. Pressley outlined the damning link between Project 2025 and the Supreme Court’s corruption.
• In a May 2024 committee hearing, Rep. Pressley highlighted the harm of Project 2025’s plans to replace tens of thousands of civil servants with partisan sycophants and destroy government infrastructure.

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