President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Friday afternoon modifying the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program to exclude organizations involved in illegal activities, a White House official said.
The program allows government workers and employees of nonprofits to erase their student loan balance after 10 years of monthly payments.
The problem with the program is that some of the people eligible for loan forgiveness engage in “improper activities,” such as supporting illegal immigration, foreign terrorist organizations, or other lawbreaking activities, according to White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf.
“This executive order will direct your Department of Education and Department of the Treasury to basically bring about modifications to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program in order to ensure that people who are engaged in these sorts of activities can’t benefit from a program that’s really not intended to support those sorts of things,” Scharf said.
“This is a program that’s designed to expedite the conclusion of payments on student loans for people who have taken federally backed student loans,” he said.
The program was used to erase the debts of only 7,000 people prior to the presidency of Joe Biden, but as of October, it had forgiven the debts of more than 1 million federal or nonprofit employees.
Trump is schedule to sign at least two executive orders in the Oval Office at 2:30 p.m. on Friday.
