Kaine Celebrates Defeat of Trump-Vance Administration's Politicization of Public Service Loan Forgiveness

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Today, U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, celebrated the defeat of the Trump-Vance Administration's effort to implement a Department of Education (ED) rule change that would have politicized and destabilized the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program by targeting for exclusion employees of organizations with which the Administration disagrees politically. ED abandoned its rule change effort Thursday after two federal judges ruled against it over the summer.

"When aspiring public servants can afford the education they need to become firefighters, teachers, nonprofit hospital staff, social workers, and many other public interest professionals, all Americans benefit," said Kaine. "I am glad to see that the Trump-Vance Administration's attempt to politicize PSLF has been defeated. The effort was a mistake from the start, and I hope to see the rest of this Administration's war on education fail similarly. I will never stop advocating for policies that make it easier for young Americans to pursue education."

Kaine has been a leading advocate in the Senate for PSLF, which grants student loan forgiveness after 10 years of qualifying loan payments to borrowers who work in specific public-service professions for that time. Earlier this year, Kaine and U.S. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) forced a Senate voteon a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to preclude Secretary of Education Linda McMahon from destabilizing PSLF. In September 2025, Kaine, Gillibrand, and Booker also led a group of their colleagues in sending a letter to Secretary McMahon expressing their opposition to ED's proposed changes, which would have effectively allowed the Department to pick and choose on a political basis who was eligible for PSLF and who was not. During the Biden-Harris Administration, Kaine successfully advocated for ED to clear through a backlog of PSLF applications that had accrued during President Donald Trump's first term, resulting in more than 615,000 borrowers-including more than 20,000 Virginians-finally receiving the loan relief they had been eligible for by law.

###