Trump Screws Over Millions With Order on Student Loan Forgiveness

Donald Trump is continuing to crack down on free speech by threatening to revoke a program that forgives the student loans of federal and non-profit employees, teachers, police, and pastors, among others.

Trump signed an executive order Friday barring individuals who engaged in “improper” activities from receiving relief under the government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, a Bush-era policy that cancels student loans after 10 years of payments.

This move is clearly intended to have a chilling effect on the work of non-profits, which operate in some of the policy spaces most affected by Trump’s agenda, such as immigration. Under Trump’s order, loan forgiveness could be stripped away from individuals who provide legal support, advocacy, or education work on behalf of undocumented immigrants.

In addition to targeting work on illegal immigration, the White House said that the order would exclude individuals whose work had been tied to foreign terrorist groups. This is a clear sign they intend to continue cracking down on pro-Palestinian advocacy and activism.

The Trump administration previously threatened to revoke federal funding from any schools that allow large protests, and on Thursday announced it would cancel $400 million in grants to Columbia University for “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Meanwhile, earlier this week, the university once again sicced police officers on its own peaceful student protesters, and has begun investigating students over speech critical of Israel.

As of December, more than two million Americans had eligible employment and open student loans, according to the Associated Press. While only a small percentage of claims are eligible for relief through PSLF, the work of hundreds of groups may be affected by Trump’s order.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on X Friday that Trump’s order was “shockingly unlawful and a clear First Amendment violation.”

“The PSLF program provides the president no authority to restrict it to only those people who work for nonprofits whose work he supports,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote. “Expect lawsuits within short periods of time.”

DropSite News’s Ryan Grim sarcastically quipped that he’d heard from the Supreme Court that “the president can’t change the terms of student loans,” a dig at the high court blocking President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness efforts.

The Trump administration is canceling $400 million in grants to Columbia University over what it says is “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

In reality, the president is clamping down on pro-Palestine protests that began in late 2023, when Israel responded to Hamas’s attack on the country with a brutal military campaign that human rights organizations have called genocide. Columbia had some of the highest profile protests of any American college campus at the time, setting up an encampment and briefly occupying a university building.

On Thursday, the administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, made up of staffers from the Justice Department, Health and Human Services Department, Education Department, and the General Services Administration, told Columbia that it would soon be conducting a “comprehensive review” of their federal grants and contracts. That review seems to have taken all of one day.

In a statement, Education Secretary Linda McMahon implied that Columbia did not comply with federal laws against discrimination.

“Since October 7, Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses — only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them,” the statement read. “Universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding. For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus. Today, we demonstrate to Columbia and other universities that we will not tolerate their appalling inaction any longer.”

Left out of the statement was the fact that the university is facing a lawsuit from three students alleging civil rights violations, breach of contract, negligence, unlawful eviction, and other Title VI violations over Columbia’s harsh crackdown on pro-Palestine student protesters.

In recent months, the university’s new disciplinary committee, the Office of Institutional Equity, has brought several cases of discriminatory harassment against students who expressed criticism of Israel. “Infractions” include writing an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for divestment from Israel, sharing social media posts supporting the Palestinian people, or joining “unauthorized protests.”

These actions appear to have been for naught in the eyes of the Trump administration, which appears to be trying to make an example out of Columbia and suppress criticism of Israel and support for Palestine. Trump is fulfilling a threat he made on Tuesday, when he said in a Truth Social post that “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests” and threatened to deport foreign students who take part in such protests.

The notion of “illegal protests,” particularly in places like colleges and universities which have a long legacy of protesting going back decades, seems to be a massive violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment, and contradicts Trump’s own claim that he “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” But Trump has never been consistent on any principles, and seeks to punish anyone who goes against his views.

Donald Trump is desperately trying to solve the country’s egg crisis, and failing.

Amid a record-breaking outbreak of avian flu that’s decimated egg production across the country, the cost of eggs has skyrocketed. Nationwide, a dozen eggs sold for $4.95 on average in January, up from $2.52 last year.

Trump’s solution? To import 70 million–100 million perishable and fragile eggs from other countries within the next month. The plan is as foolproof as it sounds. With a short shelf life, strict trade requirements for animal products, and countries abroad experiencing their own egg shortages due to bird flu, Trump is realizing that importing eggs isn’t easy.

Despite the rise in demand from the United States, there aren’t enough eggs to ship; just 3 percent of the world’s egg supply enters global trade.

“It’s a very local industry. If you want to rebalance the market, you need big volumes. It’s almost impossible, in the short term, to do that,” animal protein expert Nan-Dirk Mulder told Bloomberg.

Some of the world’s top egg-exporting countries have received egg-import requests from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bloomberg reported.

But Poland faces health certification barriers for selling eggs in U.S. retail stores. Last month, the U.S. pulled import licenses for eggs from the Netherlands—the world’s top egg exporter—due to industry practice concerns, but Trump plans to reinstate the license in a desperate bid to get Americans their eggs.

As usual, the president and his cronies are blaming Democrats, not the disease that’s killed more than 166 million commercial birds and devastated farms across the country.

“This shows the price of eggs over the last 40 years,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in an interview with Fox News, while pointing to a graph. “As you can see, the price was pretty static for 40 years, 50 years actually, and then all of a sudden under Obama it went up a little bit, Trump went down, and then Biden it has skyrocketed.”

Amid the excuses, consumers, retailers, and farmers continue to pay the price.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, alongside other miffed agency heads,  laid into billionaire bureaucrat Elon Musk during Thursday’s meeting of Donald Trump’s Cabinet, according to The New York Times. 

During the meeting, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency complained that Rubio had fired “nobody,” despite the sweeping government layoffs recommended by his organization.  

The secretary of state, who was already seething after Musk had axed USAID, an agency within Rubio’s purview, unleashed onto Musk in front of the president’s entire Cabinet. 

Rubio claimed that Musk was lying, conveniently forgetting the 1,500 officials who had taken the government’s offer for deferred resignation. Rubio even asked whether Musk wanted him to hire all of them back, just so he could fire them in a more outrageous fashion, according to the Times. Rubio then tried to lay out his plans to reorganize his agency, which didn’t impress the DOGE czar, either. 

Musk remarked that it was a good thing Rubio was so “good on TV.” 

In the end, Trump defended Rubio, who he said was doing a “great job” and was incredibly busy implementing Trump’s agenda. 

About 700 State Department employees, including 450 career diplomats, have resigned in the last two months. The Times reported Friday that senior officials at the State Department have drawn up plans to close a dozen consulates overseas by the summer, and are considering wider shutdowns—a move that will likely undermine U.S. soft power around the world. 

Rubio wasn’t the only one who got into it with the DOGE czar. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy also got heated over Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce, and accused him of trying to fire air traffic controllers. His accusation comes amid a national shortage of the highly essential workers, and following several high-profile plane crashes. 

Musk said that Duffy’s claim was a “lie,” and the two went back and forth. When Musk demanded names, Duffy said there were none because he had stepped in before the positions could actually be terminated. 

Musk then baselessly claimed that the Federal Aviation Authority had staffed air traffic control towers with so-called DEI hires, which Duffy denied. Trump ended that argument by demanding Duffy hire air traffic controllers who were “geniuses” from MIT, the Times reported. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to launch a study on connections between vaccines and autism, despite extensive research debunking the conspiracy theory.

The move comes weeks after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a long history of opposing vaccination, was confirmed as secretary of health and human services. It’s not clear if he is involved with the decision. Right now, the United States is in the midst of a massive measles outbreak resulting in two deaths and more than 150 infections, and Kennedy’s response has been lackluster.

Kennedy downplayed the first recorded measles death in a decade last week, and since then, has refused to endorse the vaccine and instead touted therapeutic remedies like vitamin A, alarming experts. Last month, on Kennedy’s first day heading the department, the CDC laid off half of its Epidemic Intelligence Service, otherwise known as the “Disease Detectives,” axing 1,260 employees.

This latest move gives in to the conspiracy theory of a link between vaccines and autism, which is fueled by a rise in diagnoses that researchers say is really due to more screenings taking place. In the late 1990s, a now-discredited and debunked British study connected autism to the widespread administration of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.

During his address to Congress on Tuesday, President Trump mentioned the rise in autism among children, tasking Kennedy with finding the cause.

“So, we’re going to find out what it is, and there’s nobody better than Bobby and all of the people that are working with you,” Trump said.

During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy denied being anti-vaccine, although he refused to acknowledge that there were no proven links between vaccines and autism. And Trump NIH nominee Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said during his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this week that he “would support a broad scientific agenda based on data to get an answer to” the rise in autism rates. It seems that, in terms of public health, the Trump administration has now adopted the philosophy of “We’re just asking questions.”