MSNBC guest really concerned that student loans can’t be forgiven if Education Department closes

A panelist on MSNBC fretted Friday that the Trump administration’s decision to begin abolishing the Department of Education (ED) would make it impossible to forgive student loans.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to start shutting down the agency she heads Thursday, fulfilling a campaign promise, while announcing Friday that student loans would be handled by the Small Business Administration (SBA). MSNBC analyst Susan del Percio told MSNBC host Alex Witt that Trump was trying to “privatize” student loans.

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“The thing that scares me the most is that the debt from those student loans will probably get privatized already, so it will no longer be the government collecting on the debt,” del Percio claimed. “If you privatize it, that means no debt forgiveness. There’s a lot that goes along with that. So that would probably be, I think, the biggest red flag that will hit people immediately.”

Despite a Supreme Court ruling that struck down an effort to forgive student loans in a 6-3 ruling in June 2023, President Joe Biden repeatedly attempted to continue forgiving the loans. In August 2024, the Supreme Court refused to lift an appeals court’s order blocking a Biden administration effort to forgive student loan debt, which it proposed following the 2023 Supreme Court decision that struck down a different student debt forgiveness proposal from Biden.

Biden announced in August 2022 that $10,000 in student loan debt would be forgiven for those who earn less than $125,000, with Pell grant recipients receiving an additional $10,000 in debt relief. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bailout would cost taxpayers $430 billion in a Sept. 26, 2022, letter to Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina.

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