What would a Democratic Congress do about student debt?
By Michael Jones
The national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time last month, setting off another round of warnings in Washington about how much the federal government owes and what it will take to bring its borrowing under control.
But millions of Americans are confronting a debt problem of their own.
More than 42 million people hold $1.7 trillion in federal student loans. Roughly nine million borrowers are in default on $220 billion of that debt, according to the latest Education Department data.
The two kinds of debt are fundamentally different, economically and otherwise. But the $40 trillion milestone comes as affordability dominates the midterm elections and Democrats make cost of living the centerpiece of their argument for winning back Congress.
That raises another question: If they do, what would they actually do for Americans struggling with student debt?
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), a member of the House Education and Workforce subcommittee that oversees higher education, told me Democrats face two challenges: helping existing borrowers and making college less expensive for future students.
“There is no reason why higher education has to be as expensive as it is in this country,” she said.
Bonamici stopped short of prescribing a specific legislative agenda before discussing it with other members of the committee and Democratic caucus. But she pointed to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program as one place to start.
The program, created by Congress in 2007, allows qualifying government and nonprofit workers to have their remaining federal student debt canceled after making 120 qualifying monthly payments.
The Biden administration made fixing PSLF a major component of its student-debt agenda after years of complaints about administrative problems that kept borrowers from receiving the forgiveness they had earned. By the end of Biden’s presidency, more than one million public-service workers had received relief through the program.
Bonamici said she heard from constituents who spent years navigating those roadblocks before finally having their debt forgiven.
“They put in their time, they put in their 10 years, they made payments based on income over that period of time they were working in public service,” she said. When borrowers finally received the relief they had been promised, she added, “people have tears in their eyes.”
“So I think you start with programs like that, like the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program,” Bonamici said.
The federal student-loan system Democrats would inherit, however, now looks considerably different from the system they controlled during the Biden years.
President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans used last year’s massive tax-and-spending law to overhaul how Americans borrow for college and repay federal student loans. Major provisions took effect in July.
New borrowers now choose between a tiered standard repayment option and the new income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan. Republicans also eliminated Grad PLUS loans for new borrowers, capped Parent PLUS borrowing at $20,000 annually and $65,000 overall per dependent student and imposed new borrowing limits on graduate and professional students.
The Trump administration argues that these changes address one underlying cause of the student-debt crisis: Colleges have been able to raise prices in part because students and families could borrow increasingly large amounts from the federal government to pay them.
The Education Department says limiting federal lending will put pressure on institutions to control costs, while the new repayment system will be simpler for borrowers to navigate. The Repayment Assistance Plan also includes protections intended to prevent balances from growing for borrowers who make their required payments.
That leaves Democrats with a more complicated task than simply reviving former President Joe Biden’s student-loan policies.
Biden attempted broad debt cancellation of as much as $20,000 per borrower before the Supreme Court struck down the program in 2023. His administration subsequently pursued relief through programs already authorized by Congress, ultimately approving debt cancellation for more than five million borrowers, including people with disabilities, borrowers whose schools defrauded them and public-service workers.
His SAVE income-driven repayment program also became entangled in litigation and was ultimately dismantled after Trump returned to office.
A Democratic House or Senate next year couldn’t simply recreate that agenda on its own. Trump would remain president, limiting the prospects for legislation he opposes. But congressional control would give Democrats the power to write and pass their own higher-education bills, conduct oversight of the Education Department and use committee hearings to challenge the administration’s implementation of the Republican law.
It would also force Democrats to decide what comes next.
Do they try to reverse Republican limits on federal borrowing? Make income-driven repayment more generous? Strengthen protections for borrowers pursuing public-service forgiveness? Pursue another form of targeted debt relief? Or focus more heavily on reducing what students have to borrow in the first place?
That last question may be the most consequential.
Federal data illustrate the scale of the immediate repayment problem. Beyond the nine million borrowers already in default, 8.4 million had at least one loan in forbearance as of March. About 13 million borrowers were enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan.
But helping those borrowers addresses debt that has already accumulated. It doesn’t resolve why students need to borrow so much to obtain a degree.
“In the short term we need a solution,” Bonamici said. “But in the long term, we just have to make higher education” more affordable.
That debate is unfolding as Republicans increasingly emphasize alternatives to four-year college, including apprenticeships, workforce training and shorter credential programs. The Trump administration has framed its higher-education overhaul partly around expanding those options and making students and institutions more accountable for whether expensive degrees produce sufficient economic returns.
Bonamici agrees that college shouldn’t be treated as the only route to a successful career. She told me students who prefer an apprenticeship, the trades or another workforce pathway should have access to one.
But she rejects the idea that those alternatives diminish the value of college—or that its current price should be accepted as inevitable.
The economic data support her on the first point. Workers with bachelor’s degrees had median weekly earnings of $1,578 in 2025, compared with $966 for workers whose highest level of education was a high-school diploma, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bachelor’s-degree holders also experienced lower unemployment.
The challenge for Democrats is figuring out how to preserve that opportunity without requiring so many Americans to spend years—or decades—paying for it.
“Anybody who wants to go to college should be able to do that without worrying about how they’re going to pay for it,” Bonamici said.
She invoked former president Lyndon B. Johnson’s call to “open the doors of opportunity” when he signed the Higher Education Act more than six decades ago.
“Higher education is still a good investment,” Bonamici said. “We have to have a path for everybody.”
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
