This story has been updated to clarify sourcing.
Donald Trump’s entire presidential philosophy appears to be making sure he fulfills every single one of his campaign promises, no matter what reality looks like. His latest effort to show his base that he’s sticking it to Obama — who hasn’t been president for three months — is a rollback of a rule that protected student loan borrowers from fees when they attempted to enter into repayment agreements after defaulting.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education asked collection agencies that work with defaulted debt to ignore a memo from former President Barack Obama that forbid them from charging fees “for up to 16 percent of the principal and accrued interest owed on the loans, if the borrower entered the government’s loan rehabilitation program within 60 days of default,” The Washington Post reported.
The Trump administration’s rationale was that the measure, which covers roughly half of all student loans in default, should have had public input before being implemented.
“The department will not require compliance with the interpretations set forth [in the Obama memo] without providing prior notice and an opportunity for public comment on the issues,” a two-page “Dear colleague” letter from the Trump administration said.
The move came just days after the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) released a study finding that 1.1 million Americans hadn’t made payments on their student loans for at least nine months of last year, 14 percent more defaults than in 2015.
The quickening pace of student loan defaults, and the rapidly expanding amount of student loan debt being accumulated, has some worried that we might be on the verge of another crisis akin to the subprime mortgage bubble that facilitated the 2008 recession.
But! Donald Trump can tell his shrinking base that he’s getting things done. So at least there’s that.
