The Confirmation Battles at Dept of Education | Student Loan Questions Answered

Hello and welcome again to the Student Loan Planner Podcast. I'm Travis. We've got a great episode for you today. I'm excited to dive into a lot of this stuff that's flying all over the place and we're going to get to some really incredibly juicy questions coming from listeners that have come into our inbox lately that I think you will really love to hear the answers to. That's going to be at the end of today's show. First, I want to talk about the confirmation battles that are going to be happening with the Department of Education and what it's going to mean for policy and I'm also going to kind of explain a little bit why we have not seen enormous policy changes on student loans yet and why that might be about to change. So, a whole lot of stuff to talk about in today's episode. So, the first thing I want to talk about specifically is the confirmation hearings that we're expecting for the potential Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon. At the time I recorded this, I'm recording this just a couple or a few days before the episode comes out. We might already have a confirmation hearing either scheduled or that's maybe even already happened depending on how fast they move on things. Now, this is a pretty big deal because essentially if you think about, first of all, will she be confirmed? There's some allegations and lawsuits about things that happened under her watch when she was working at the Wrestling Federation, right? So, will that stop her confirmation? I don't think there's any chance that it's going to stop it. I think she's going to go through very easily, I think. If you think about the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, he was confirmed. He was an extremely controversial nominee and he got passed on a 50-50 vote with the Vice President casting the tie vote, right? So, I do think that we're going to see Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education. That's my prediction. We'll see if I'm right. So, when you have her in charge at the Department of Ed, what happens next? So, there are other roles, a lot of politically appointed roles at the Department of Education that have yet to be filled. And this is normal in any switchover in administrations, particularly in an administration that's going from one party to another party. You've got a lot of people that leave the administration before anyone even gets in place. And then you've got folks that are essentially in place until they're fired or until they resign or until they're, you know, replaced, right? And so, there's Undersecretary of Education, which is kind of like the number two person. And there's a bunch of Deputy Undersecretaries of Education for specific policy areas. So, I want to give you an example of this because I think it's kind of interesting to think through what will the Trump administration team look like at Department of Ed that's going to be making a lot of these policy choices. So, you've got Deputy Undersecretary for like higher education, for example. And in the Biden administration, this role was occupied by a person named James Cavall. Now, this was someone that worked with a higher ed think tank. He is sort of what I would call an Obama Democrat in the sense that he was more of a centrist, he's more of a good government technocratic kind of a person. And I remember his confirmation really well just because this was a really interesting one because his confirmation was held up, which is very unusual for a lower ranking Deputy Undersecretary without any sort of, you know, checkered history, right? And the reason it was held up, it was held up by Senator Warren. And if you think about the Biden administration and its approach to student loans, it was really the first administration, I think, I mean, in my opinion ever, that made student loans an absolute centerpiece of their domestic policy agenda. And what was frankly happening is the sort of Warren-Sanders wing of the Democratic Party really were, and their allies were really able to have a lot of key positions, you know, in Department of Ed and really drive policy at Department of Ed in a lot of ways, especially on student loans. So the COO of Federal Student Aid, Rich Cordray, was not a technical, technocrat type of appointment or career, you know, bureaucrat type of appointment. It was actually the first, you know, someone who would be considered more of a political appointee to that role, I believe, in the history of that role. And that was intentional, right? One of the big things that President Biden had to do when he, you know, consolidated support within the Democratic Party was get the Sanders-Warren wing on board politically for his administration. And one of the sort of easier, cheaper areas to do that was by being more progressive on education than he was in some other areas in his administration, right? And so you did have Senator Warren, really, I think, and, you know, her sort of group of folks around her, right, I think, was really the center of, sort of the center of thought of what should be the policies coming out of Department of Ed in that first, you know, couple years of the Biden administration. And so how do I know this? Well, look at the American Rescue Plan. So that policy provision of making student loan forgiveness tax-free for the next, you know, until 2025, until the end of this year, 2025, that was something that was put in by Senator Warren's office. And that was done specifically because all of the stuff they did with the IDR account adjustment and all the, you know, attempted student loan cancellation literally could not happen if the IRS taxed that forgiveness as income because people couldn't afford to pay the tax bills. So that was a very strategic plan. Also remember that Senator Warren sent a letter to Department of Ed right at the beginning of the Biden administration to ask how many people had been in repayment for 5, 10, you know, 15, 20, 25 years on their student loans. But she defined that request as tell me, you know, people that have been in repayment on at least one loan for that length of time. And so the definition she asked for was the definition that was used in the IDR account adjustment. That was very much planned, right? So you had this very coordinated effort with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, with the, you know, the student borrower protection center folks that, a lot of whom helped write those 2007-era IBR and PSLF laws. And that was monumental for student borrowers in terms of people that got a lot of forgiveness with the PSLF waiver, got higher credits towards their loan forgiveness under the IDR account adjustment. It was instrumental in getting the same plan put forward. So it was really this big, you know, policy think tank within the administration that was pushing a lot of this stuff. And so the question that I've got is when you have all these confirmation hearing battles that are going to take place over the Trump administration's appointees, who is going to be that central person that's going to be deciding what the administration is going to do on student loans? And will there be any person that's doing this? Are we going to see, you know, a very conservative senator come out against, you know, the quote-unquote waste, fraud, and abuse line that often you hear from the Republican side of the aisle on some of these domestic spending programs? Are you going to see someone, you know, come out that's very, very anti-student loans, anti, you know, big spending on higher education that's unlimited? Will we see somebody with that same energy that you saw with, like, the Senator Warren and the progressive side come out and try to immediately make an impact in big policy areas on student loans? Is that going to happen? It's hard to say, right? If you look at some of the key advisors around President Trump, like, for example, Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy, a lot of the core kind of spots where, you know, sort of the MAGA movement is most sort of, you know, vocal are in things like trade and, you know, immigration, energy. Student loans, I mean, student loans kind of are very far down the list. One of the things we know on that is if you look at the, you know, the sort of the executive order so far that we've seen from the Trump administration on education, it's actually been only three things. Stuff around school choice, stuff around, you know, firing, you know, DEI-related staff at Department of Ed and trying to de-emphasize DEI initiatives, and also stuff to block or, you know, limit antisemitism on college campuses. So the only thing even related to higher ed has been that order on stopping antisemitism on college campuses, right, which was, you know, sort of a, basically a reaction to the protests that were taking place in a lot of, you know, more elite universities in the past several months of the Biden administration. So, you know, if you think about why, you know, student loans not making the list there, I think in a big way that Deputy Undersecretary for Higher Education is often a very wonkish policy person that drives the bus on student loans within the Department of Ed. And then the COO of Federal Student Aid is also somebody that, you know, kind of co-drives the bus along with that Deputy Undersecretary of Ed. And the question is, is from an executive branch perspective, are those folks going to do anything in the same way that, you know, the Biden administration had folks in those roles that were very, very, you know, action-oriented in terms of what they wanted to achieve? And again, with James Cabal, the prior Deputy Undersecretary for Higher Education that helped, you know, usher in all the IDR account adjustment policy, the PSLF waiver policies, the SAVE plan, you know, the reason why Senator Warren held up his confirmation, I believe, was to extract promises from him that he would not get in the way of that planned, you know, sort of big effort at getting mass cancellation and, you know, lots of extra relief towards borrowers. Again, because Cabal was more of a centrist, sort of, you know, sort of center-left, a good government Democrat, right, was not somebody that would necessarily be identified with that Sanders-Warren wing of the party. And that was, you know, essentially, I think, what was trying to be done. So will we see any similar concessions? Will Trump appointments to some of these roles in Department of Ed, will we see any key senators hold up some of their nominations to extract promises from them? Hey, we want to make sure that you promise us you're going to limit Parent Plus or Grad Plus. We want you to promise us that you're going to do everything you can to undo, you know, runaway forgiveness under income-driven repayment programs, right? I'm just sort of thinking about some of the things that Republican senators might try to extract as promises. Now, in this case, when you have a 53 to 47 Senate, there's actually not that much, I think, that they'll be able to extract from these appointments, to be real frank. If you look at who the two senators are that typically would vote against the controversial Trump appointments, it's going to be the senator in Maine and the senator in Alaska. They're considered more moderates. And so you have a 51 to 49 advantage of folks that would normally support any reasonable Trump appointment that's not really extreme, I guess. And then, you know, you still have that extra buffer of, you know, having a 50-50 Senate where the vice president can cast a tie vote. So, you know, I think that we will see a lot of folks confirmed. I don't think that you're going to have to make any concessions that would limit what they would do or probably push what they would do in a more aggressive sense. And so now we're sort of waiting for the reconciliation bill that has to get passed, right? And we know that because the reconciliation bill has to get passed because the Trump tax cuts expire at the end of 2025. And so they have to be renewed in some capacity. Otherwise, people's taxes will go way up. And obviously, with the unified Republican control of Washington, they're not going to let that happen. And, you know, also from the American Rescue Plan, the tax-free forgiveness provision on student loans, that also expires at the end of 2025. And so that's up for renewal as well. And so what's going to happen in terms of the horse trading of some of these key provisions and what could potentially Democrats go along with, what could moderate Republicans demand gets put into a bill, right? You know, we're going to find out. It's going to be coming pretty soon, you know. So I'm focused on these confirmation hearings in the next week ahead in terms of what are some short-term things that we might learn. Just a quick note on the big freeze on federal loans and grants that happened and then unhappened, like almost as fast as it happened. So for those of you that don't know, there was a big policy memorandum issued where all federal grants and loans outside of those made to individuals were going to be paused while the administration reviewed those spending amounts and if it was aligned with policy priorities. And then a court blocked that with an injunction. And then the White House basically was just like, okay, we'll just drop it because we don't want to battle this in court. We want to spend our efforts on something else, such as doing a spending review, which is also going to be effective at them identifying things that they want to change or cut back on. And, you know, they're just going to go out trying to cut back on things they don't agree with in a different way. You know, so definitely the second Trump administration is moving way faster than the first one because, you know, they're not new to this, right? They know the president's team knows how to move quickly compared to that first administration when they probably weren't expecting to win, right? So the thing I want to do next is take some listener questions. And again, these are really good questions and I think that you'll be really interested in several of these. So let's go ahead and pause for some listener questions. Hi, Travis. My name is Robert. I watch a lot of your podcasts for the last probably year. So I really appreciate the information you put out there. I have a question about myself. So I originally had loans taken out from my undergrad that were prior to 2007. I had those loans. I got finished my bachelor's work, paid them all off prior to July 2014. And then I went back to graduate school in 2015. What I'm trying to figure out is if I had them paid off prior to that July 2014, I believe that you mentioned something about having a loan balance or having no loan balance, then the new loans after 2014 would qualify for the new IBR. Or at least that's my understanding. I'm currently looking at a job that's PSLF eligible. And as soon as they give me a contract, I'm debating basically trying to change into either new IBR or pay. And I want it to last as long as I can. All right. Thank you. I'm a big fan. I appreciate what you're doing. So if you are somebody that's paid off their old loans prior to taking out a new loan, then you are a new borrower. So if you were a new borrower, you're a new borrower if you had no existing loan balance when you took out your first loan after 2014. So in this case, this borrower should be considered a new borrower because they paid off their old balance and they took out loans after a certain date and they didn't have those old loans that were already pre-existing. So that's like an example of how complicated student loan rules can be. Because in this case, this person paid off their old loan balance and took out their first loan after 2014, July 2014. They took out their first loan after that date and they'd already paid off their old balance. Then taking out those new loans, that would make them a new borrower. They can qualify for new IBR, which is 20 years until forgiveness and 10% of income instead of 15% of your income in 25 years until forgiveness. So again, a really good example of how complicated student loan rules can be. And it really can be pretty nuts sometimes. So for example, this person had taken out their first loan before that 2014 date, but they had paid off the old loan balance before they took it out. So let's say the person took out their first loan in 2012 after they paid off their old loans in 2011, then they would be eligible for pay, for example, but not new IBR. So really, really intense and confusing stuff. But that was a really good question. Let's take another one. Hi, Travis. This is Elisa from New York City. I have a loan forgiveness question. I have actually made over 300 qualifying payments and enrolled in SAVE, but the application is still processing. And I recently tried to switch to IBR and that's still processing. So I'm wondering today if you think I should switch instead of IBR to ICR. I'm a successful lawyer after many, many years of practice and have a higher income. So I don't know if it matters if I should go from IBR to ICR or does it matter since I technically already have over 300 months of payments. I really appreciate your help and happy new year. Thank you. So, I mean, this question is so interesting and important because what it shows is just why people need to be really paying attention right now. So remember that the court injunction blocks all forgiveness under any plans associated with the ICR statute. ICR statute includes ICR, pay, repay, save, anything that was created from the ICR statute, including ICR itself. So if you look at the IBR statute, the forgiveness that you can get under IBR is not held up by the court injunction. So for example, anybody that's over the threshold for forgiveness under the like the 240 or 300 payments that you would need, the 20 and 25 years like private sector version of forgiveness, anybody in that camp has got to be on IBR. Otherwise you do not qualify for forgiveness during this time of the court injunction while we are waiting to find out whether or not forgiveness under ICR statute is something that courts believe is even allowable. And so in the case of somebody who's a high income person that would not have a qualifying partial financial hardship to sign up for the IBR plan, that could result in somebody not being able to get into the IBR plan at all. And so in that situation, what somebody would have to do is probably take a break from their job to probably try to take an unpaid leave of absence to get a lower income to be able to truthfully state that their income had declined since their last federal tax return. That would allow them to get that partial financial hardship to sign up for the IBR plan at zero dollars a month and then be able to actually get their loans discharged that way. I also want to throw out a cautionary tale of things that I am seeing with the IDR account adjustment. And this is something that again, I don't think is going to negatively impact borrowers by me saying this because I think that the forgiveness is blocked in many cases with this injunction anyway. And also the new administration is going to be doing painstaking policy reviews of everything anyway. So I'm going to say this because I don't think it's going to hurt borrowers. The IDR account adjustments in many cases that the Biden administration did at the very last second while they were leaving the White House, in many cases these payment counts are wrong. And what I mean by that is I've seen numerous cases of people having their in-school deferment counted for their IDR forgiveness. That is not how the program works. The in-school deferment is not supposed to count towards the IDR forgiveness count trackers. In some cases we've seen people with many years of additional credit that actually would not be there under the terms of the IDR account adjustment. So in other cases we've seen people that are short of what they should have because the payment count tracker didn't capture something complicated. So like you might expect, they rushed this out the door with literally three or four days of time left in their time at the White House. And when you do something that has errors in it, like this IDR account adjustment seems to have, the new administration is absolutely going to pick up on that and they could potentially raise questions as to the validity of the IDR account adjustment overall. Now I do not think the administration will be able to claw back what was promised in the IDR account adjustment. The reason for that is because it's too hard to unravel. It's too hard to undo. The payment account tracker at this point, what I would probably expect from them is they will do a painstaking analysis of this IDR account adjustment and they will probably try to make sure all the in-school deferment is backed out of that adjustment. And the reality with student loans is if there's a bank error in your favor, don't point it out. You're not obligated to. If it's a payment count that is much lower than what you should have, definitely tell people about it. Definitely challenge it. If it's a payment account amount that's above what you should have, don't say anything and hope that nobody notices. You're not doing anything wrong by not bringing it to their attention. That's their responsibility, right? So I've seen this in many cases with people's IDR payments, for example. The payment will come in at a number that just is absolutely not what's based off of their tax return and you're asking the question, why? This makes no sense. Why would they give this person a payment amount that's $200 a month lower than what they should have according to the calculations that are public? And some of the times the answer is because servicers are incompetent and they just make stuff up. And sometimes the Department of Ed is incompetent and they make stuff up. So that would be some of my cautionary recommendations for anybody that's looking at their IDR payment account adjustment. Is it what you expect it is? If it's a lot more than you thought, there might be a reason and you might want to double check that the numbers are correct. So let's take another question. Hi there. I was wondering about the one-time count adjustment. Are those still valid? I happen to have 348 payments on record now according to the studentaid.gov site. I've also applied for ICR last March and recently IDR. So I'm wondering, is that in jeopardy if I'm still on the standard plan but I have enough payment for forgiveness? Any thoughts? Any tips? So again, the IDR account adjustment is absolutely valid. You know, like I have to tell everybody, anything is possible. And just because anything is possible does not mean it's a high probability. So is it possible that the Trump administration could reverse the IDR account adjustment and, you know, wipe out all credit that happened from the pre-consolidation changes that were made? Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? No. Is it even maybe like a little bit likely? No, I don't think it is. And again, the reason there is just because of how hard it would be to completely undo this. You have to think about the amount of work it was to make the adjustment in the first place. And that was trying to take a very simple approach of, hey, you know, computer, find oldest loan. Pretend oldest loan is the whole loan. Change date to oldest loan, right? It was a very sort of simple kind of approach. And you could say, well, it could also be simple to undo that by just saying, okay, hey, it's a new loan. The loan was consolidated. You know, redo the credit based off of what was happening after the consolidation. The reality though is just, again, that would just be too difficult. I'm sure it would be subject to lawsuits. I think the Trump administration wants to spend its time doing other things, and I don't think that they would want to do the level of work it would require to undo all this. So, you know, in terms of things that could happen from the IDR account adjustment, I would be a lot more concerned with, you know, them just pulling the payment counter tracker down or slow walking forgiveness or, you know, kind of not challenging a very conservative court ruling that says that there's no forgiveness through the ICR statute at all, which would mean the only way people could get forgiveness would be through IBR. So there's other ways that they could be, you know, uber conservative on student loans besides undoing the IDR account adjustment, you know, because I have to tell you that, you know, anything could happen, but I don't think that this will happen. It's not something that I would be worried about if I consolidated, you know, and would go from, you know, 15 years of credit to zero years of credit if they undid that. I would understand people being nervous about that, but it's something that I would absolutely not worry about if that was something that I was relying on personally, because it's just really not something that I believe that they can do at this point. So let's take another question. Hey, what's up, guys? Appreciate all your content. It's been super helpful for me. I've got a scenario I want to ask you about based off some of the previous information I've gotten from the channel. So I just graduated CRNA school last May. I started working in June. I was keeping up with what was going on in the news with the SAVE plan, and I was able to file for the SAVE plan in between the injunctions, and I got on it. I've been keeping up with the servicer. My interest is not accruing, and my resert date would be in July. I was supposed to start making payments next month, but that date has been moved back to July, and as I understand it, an email I got from either the servicer or Department of Education said payments would not be going on until February of was an email that I got. But this scenario I wanted to ask about is, so with me in school, my wife denies marriage filing jointly tax return is about $70,000. Now, in the first six months of working, which is a substantial increase, of course, and then if you forecast it out the next year, it's probably going to be closer to $400,000 as a family, maybe even more, who knows. But what I'm saying is, as I resert, this payment is going to increase substantially. If I have an opportunity to keep it low for two years, I can kind of bank some cash and take massive chunks out of the principal, save money for us. It makes sense for me to, within the current climate where things can change rapidly, should I file for an extension, or is your opinion of this, should I file for an extension this year in the event that we get some ruling from the Trump administration, Department of Education as the new cabinet settles in about immediate research? Because it is my understanding from watching the channel that I would be, if that happened, and I thank you guys so much for all your content, it's really helped me, and I look forward to hearing your response on this. So another really interesting question here. I think that if you have the ability to keep your payment low, I can't think of a reason not to do that. And what I mean by that is, yes, filing for an extension can give you opportunity to use an old tax return for longer. So if you're a new grad and you need to file your 2024 tax returns, I think that there's probably very little downside. If you haven't filed your 2023 tax returns at all because you made no income, you can still do that. It's only penalties if you have income that you didn't report, and taxes you didn't pay. So if your income is zero, filing a late 2023 tax return is fine. You just file the tax return. And then for 2024, you just file the extension form, and then that gives you the opportunity to wait it out until as late as mid-October before that actually becomes due. Now, you do still have to pay the taxes due by that 2024 filing deadline of April 15th, right? But you do get extra time to finalize your tax return, which gives you the opportunity to go and use that old tax term for longer. So somebody who's got a rapidly increasing income in any capacity absolutely should do an extension. The only thought process that I've got is, how do you think through the order of everything that you want to do? And this is really an opportunity to think. I mean, this is one thing that we love doing at SLP Wealth, our financial advisory firm, is because it's pretty interesting because you can do a lot of things. So if you're making 400K income, that's really good. Some of our listeners make more than that. A lot of our listeners make less than that, but that's a good income. Even half that would be a pretty good income. And it's like, well, what do I do with this? What is the first thing that I should handle first? And getting an emergency fund, getting rid of any bad personal debt, like credit card debt kind of stuff, it's great. And then just deciding, what is that first big thing you're going to try to tackle? Is it retirement? Is it getting 529 accounts set up for kids? Is it saving for having a baby? Is it saving for down payment on a house? A lot of different things that you could do. And having a low and flexible student loan payment could really help with that. So I think that a big question too would be, how big are the loans? And is there any opportunity to go for any kind of forgiveness program, right? So you might assume, okay, if I've got a huge household income, hey, even though I'm at a not-for-profit hospital, there's no way that I can get something like PSLF because I just make too much money. And that would be a mistake. So a lot of people, high income people, don't understand that if you do some of that extension strategy, if you consolidate right away, if you get those low payments going right away, you could potentially get three years of fairly low payments in the first period of your career. And then for those final seven-ish years of payments, you might be able to manage just a capped standard ten-year payment on the IVR plan. And then that would give you the ability to pay maybe 70% or 80% of your loan balance instead of 100% plus interest because you would only have seven years of large payments, and you wouldn't actually pay the full balance off because this first three years would be fairly limited. So there's all kinds of hacks for new grads. Obviously, any new grads listening to this or recent grads listening to this, getting a consult early on is a big money saver in a lot of cases. So that's a real good question. Let's take one more question from our listeners today. Hi, Travis. I listened to your most recent podcast and just have a question about something that you You mentioned that at any time the Trump administration may tell us folks in the SAVE forbearance that we need to recertify our income and start paying back our loans. My question is, if that were to happen, what are they actually going to tell us to pay back? So for example, the SAVE plan is being challenged. It's likely to be either thrown out by the 8th Circuit Court or no longer pursued by the Trump administration. So how are they going to come up with an amount, a monthly amount for us to pay back each month? Thank you. I'm just really loving all the questions today. These are all such good questions. So if you think about the rules and the available options for student loans, there is the IBR statute, and that is absolutely not under any legal challenges whatsoever. So while the ICR statute is under legal challenges because of the SAVE plan and having the SAVE plan come from that statute, the IBR income-based repayment statute is not being challenged at all. So the Trump administration could very easily say, after a conservative court ruling that strikes down the SAVE plan, hey, great news. There's already a congressionally passed income-driven repayment option available to all borrowers, and it's called income-based repayment, and everybody's going to be switched into that. Now, I think that what they would actually do in practice is if they struck down the SAVE plan in the courts and if they said all these ICR plans are illegal or whatever, then I think borrowers would be sent a message that would be something like, hey, here's your standard 10-year payment amount, which would cause hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people to call their congressperson and their senator because, oh my gosh, can you imagine people getting all standard 10-year payments after literally six or seven years of low or zero payments or paused payments? I would say probably at least half of all student loan borrowers, in my mind, are probably thinking and living like they don't have student loan debt at all just because of the policies that have been in place the past five years, and that's not a criticism. It's just reality, right? If we're going into 2020 in the pandemic with low payments because you're a recent grad, which is really how most people experience things, right? You have a six-month grace period after graduation or you're in deferment because you're still in school, right? So think about that. There's tons, probably a quarter of all borrowers, rather recent grads are still in school, right? They're still actively taking out more debt. And the other maybe big chunk might be recent grads that have really low IDR payments. So maybe at least like a third to a half of all borrowers had real low payments going into the pandemic, and then you had a three-plus-year student loan pause, and then you had a save plan that caused, you know, that also used old recertification data for IDR to keep the payments like ultra low, and then you had a save plan for parents that did zero payments and zero interest for a really extended period of time too. And so like with inflation and all these costs that have soared really since pre-pandemic, a lot of folks' budgets are just absolutely not going to be prepared for anything like what we're about to see. And it makes me nervous. I'm just going to be honest, like for borrowers, right? Because that's why we exist. That's why C-Loan Planner exists, to help out borrowers and make their lives less stressful. And this is unavoidably something that's going to cause a lot of borrower stress. The good news is, is you're a self-selected group. You're a special person listening to this. I'm not worried about you per se, because you are listening to something that the vast majority of C-Loan borrowers are not listening to. And for you, it's not going to be a surprise if you've got a standard payment notice in the mail or in the email that said, hey, you got to pay one percent of your balance per month. You would know, oh, I just go to studentaid.gov slash IDR and I go apply for IBR, and now my payment's, you know, by definition affordable relative to my income, right? Because it's going to be 10 or 15 percent of my discretionary income. But a whole bunch of people are not going to be thinking that at all. They're not going to be even knowing that's an option. And I would not be shocked if like Department of Ed, you know, does not emphasize that people can pay affordable payments with IBR. You know, they might just say reach out to your servicer, right? And then people are going to just not know what to do. So again, in terms of the power the Trump administration has over IDR recertification dates, I think the power is extremely strong as to what they could do. In terms of kicking everybody off the same plan of forbearance, maybe that's a little bit more limited in terms of their scope of power, but I think that it is, you know, still very possible that they could just issue guidance randomly that just ends it. And the reason is, think about how the Biden administration operated. That's how you have to get clues about what the Trump administration can do is look at what President Biden did. And what did he do with IDR recertification dates? Hey, we're going to kick the IDR recertification date to February, whatever, because, you know, YOLO. Oh, the planets are aligned. We need to extend the IDR recertification date, right? I mean, I'm just joking around a little bit, but there really was not any super formal reason ever given on why they needed to extend the IDR recertification dates as much as they did. And so that would suggest that there's absolutely nothing that would stop the new education folks at Department of Ed from just saying, hey, time to pay up. Borrowers, you've had, you know, five plus years of low payments. It's time to pay based on your income. Let's go. And that's why people need to be ready to recertify their incomes with good tax returns just in case, because that is absolutely something that could happen. And so if they were to kick everybody off the SAVE plan forbearance, because think about the SAVE plan forbearance, what happened there? The court challenges happened. They said SAVE wasn't legal. They had put an injunction on the SAVE plan. What did Biden do? They just said, okay, everybody's on a payment pause. Everybody has zero interest. And then nobody challenged, you know, like the student loan, uh, you know, refi companies that challenged the student loan pause when they extended it for like the umpteenth time, like it was three plus years into the pause, the student loan refi companies finally sued to block it. Notice the student loan refi companies did not sue to block the SAVE plan forbearance with 0% interest, even though that's really negatively impacting those refinancing companies. The reason is I think that they know that this pause is going to be very temporary. So remember that the Biden administration was promising all these wild things going into the very end of the administration specifically about, you know, how nobody's gonna have to make a payment probably until February, 2026 at the earliest. That's ridiculous. They can't promise that. They have a new administration that's taking over. Any promises the Biden administration made or, you know, at this point on student loan stuff, uh, besides some of the things that I mentioned that would be too difficult to undo, like the IDR account adjustment, PSLF waiver, et cetera, some of those promises they made at the very last second, I would say maybe, maybe in particular, the promises they made at the very last second are really not promises you can count on at all, right? Because the new administration, when they get their people in there, if the Biden administration was able to just really easily say something, the new administration could very easily say something different. And that administration is in power for the next four years. Biden administration is not in power anymore. And, you know, you also don't have a, uh, democratic house or Senate. So the only power, you know, Democrats have pretty much is to, you know, kind of make protest statements, try to influence things, try to horse trade votes for things you need 60 votes in the Senate for, and, you know, file lawsuits in, uh, court jurisdictions that are more friendly to progressive groups, kind of like how the conservative groups kept using the, uh, you know, courts in Missouri, uh, and the Eighth Circuit to kind of, you know, in Texas to file their, you know, preferred lawsuits, right? So we've got all these things happening, all these sort of chaotic moves occurring. I'm sure you're going to have questions about it. If you have questions, we'd love to feature them on a future podcast episode, because I love getting your questions. It's really fun to feature them. So if you want to ask a question ever, just remember that studentloanplanner.com slash voicemail URL. You just type it into your browser, studentloanplanner.com slash voicemail. It's going to take you to a spot where you can just press record on your phone, leave a 30 second to a 60 second question. If it goes over, that's fine. Don't worry about it. Love getting your questions. If you need a student loan consult, you know where to go for that, studentloanplanner.com. Just click on the get help buttons and you'll be able to book a call with one of our experts. And, you know, thank you so much for following this stuff. It's really, uh, motivating to know that we're all in this together. And I've been through many administrations now, I guess, from doing this since 2015-ish, about 10 years. I've seen President Obama, President Trump, um, President Biden, President Trump again. Very different policies, very different administrations, but student loan borrowers have been able to save money on every single one of them because it's all about knowing the loopholes, knowing what is and isn't the case, knowing what something's going to, what an administration is going to focus on versus what they're not going to focus on, and then using it to benefit borrowers. That's what we're all about. And we are only able to do it because you listen to the show today. Um, one, uh, kind of final, uh, shameless plug. If you like the show, if you think other student loan borrowers would benefit from listening to it, if you're listening in any place where you can leave a review for the show, I haven't gotten a review kind of in the past, maybe, I don't know, a few weeks or something. So it's always good to get fresh reviews so that people can find the show. Uh, so if you like listening to this and you like the free stuff, uh, and you think other borrowers might benefit from it, just Student Loan Planner Podcasts anywhere you're listening to the show. If you leave a review, it's much appreciated. Thank you all for listening to the Student Loan Planner Podcast. Have a great rest of your week.