President Donald Trump’s student-loan repayment overhaul has been hit with a fresh lawsuit.
On Tuesday, 25 Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education and its leader, Linda McMahon, saying that the borrowing caps in the Trump’s “big beautiful” spending legislation exceeded the department’s authority and were outside the realm of what Congress intended.
Trump’s legislation, which will go into effect July 1, places a $100,000 lifetime borrowing cap on graduate students, and a $200,000 cap on “professional” degree students. It also specified a list of 11 programs that meet the definition of “professional,” including medicine, dentistry, and law, but not advanced nursing degrees.
The lawsuit said that the department’s definition of professional is too narrow and risks worsening the healthcare worker shortage. It will also drive some students to private lending, which tends to be costlier, the lawsuit said. The suit asks the court to overturn the professional degree definition and expand access to borrowing.
“You should not have to be wealthy to serve your community as a nurse, physical therapist, or physician assistant,” said Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, in a statement. “Higher education is expensive, and our health care system is already under immense strain. This rule will shut talented people out of critical professions and leave communities with fewer health care providers they desperately need.”
In response to the lawsuit, Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a statement that “after decades of unchecked student loan borrowing that gave schools no reason to control costs, these commonsense loan caps — created by Congress — are already incentivizing colleges and universities to lower tuition.”
The department cited the University of California Irvine, which announced that it cut its tuition for an advanced business degree in response to the new borrowing caps.
“Clearly, these Democratic governors and attorneys general are more concerned about institutions’ bottom-line rather than American students and families’ ability to access affordable postsecondary education,” Kent said.
The exclusion of nursing programs has been a central focus for lawmakers across the aisle. Also on Tuesday, a bipartisan pair of senators introduced a bill to include advanced nursing degrees in the department’s “professional” definition, saying that nurses should not face limited federal financing.
