The program is called Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which means, if you spend a decade teaching third graders or answering 911 calls, the government forgives the remainder of your federal student loans. That is the deal. That has been the deal since 2007. It is not a complicated deal. It is, in the parlance of actual forgiveness, a thing you do and then stop doing.
The Trump administration, however, identified a problem with this arrangement: too many people were qualifying. The solution, as solutions go, was elegant. They did not repeal the program — repealing a thing requires Congress, and Congress is busy not doing other things. They simply added a new eligibility condition. Henceforth, if your employer had a “substantial illegal purpose,” you were out. No forgiveness. No decade of service credited. Just a brisk administrative wave goodbye.
Now, “substantial illegal purpose” is a phrase that sounds like it was coined by a committee that had already used up “significant unlawful objective” and “meaningful criminal intent” on earlier memos. But let us take it seriously, because seriousness is exactly what it deserves. A substantial illegal purpose. Not a minor one. Not a recreational one. Substantial. So we are drawing a line, and the line is somewhere between jaywalking and something more substantial. The department declined to say precisely where, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of marking a map with “here be dragons” and billing it as a zoning ordinance.
Two federal judges looked at this new standard and asked the natural follow-up question: under what legal authority, exactly? The administration's answer, it turned out, was the administrative equivalent of a shrug dressed in a blazer. The Higher Education Act, the courts noted, did not grant the executive branch the authority to invent new eligibility criteria wholesale. You can administer a program. You cannot administer an entirely different program and call it the same one.
The judges struck the restrictions down. Public service workers — teachers, nurses, public defenders, the people who show up when things go wrong — are eligible again under the terms that were originally advertised. The government, for its part, had attempted to forgive itself the obligation of forgiving anyone it found inconvenient. The courts, in a rare act of institutional literalism, declined to extend that particular courtesy.
Forgiveness, it turns out, is harder to redefine than it is to deny. The word already means something. That was the problem.