Teachers are suing the government because the government is bad at math.
That is the dispute. Congress built Public Service Loan Forgiveness in 2007. ,A borrower makes 120 qualifying payments while working in public service, and the remaining federal balance is canceled., Ten years of showing up. Ten years of paperwork. Finish the course, get the prize.
The prize is now in a filing cabinet somewhere in the District of Columbia.
The American Federation of Teachers and nine borrowers ,filed suit against the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Linda McMahon., The complaint says the department is ,withholding or delaying PSLF "Buyback" determinations, failing to credit time worked in public service and clawing back time it had already credited.,
Clawing back. Imagine finishing a marathon and being told the last mile was a rumor.
AFT president Randi Weingarten and her co-plaintiffs say ,88,000 borrowers are stuck waiting because their past service is not being counted properly., The department's explanation is ,coding errors., A typo. Eighty-eight thousand public servants are in limbo because someone fat-fingered a spreadsheet.
Teachers, mind you. These are people who spend their days explaining to eleven-year-olds why deadlines matter.
This is also round two. ,The administration agreed to resume some forgiveness as part of a deal with AFT, months after the union first sued., A settlement, a handshake, and then another lawsuit. It's the student loan version of a sequel nobody asked for.
Traders will say this is irrelevant to their portfolios. They're correct. Their own student loans are the ones sitting in a drawer next to their options-expiration regrets, and no judge is coming for those.
Eighty-eight thousand teachers did the math perfectly. The government couldn't count to 120.
Photo by Sarah Penney on Unsplash
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