The American Federation of Teachers sued the Trump administration Friday over delays and errors in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
The union filed the complaint in federal court in Washington, D.C., but national and local leaders gathered in Boston to make the announcement.
The class action lawsuit claims some borrowers have waited nearly two years for the Federal Student Aid office to process paperwork that would qualify them for public service loan forgiveness, while other borrowers have seen the Education Department erase months of credit they’d already earned toward debt cancellation.
“I hear these stories all the time across America. People have done what they’re supposed to do,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “They’ve actually filed all the paperwork and then they hear nothing.”
The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.
The American Federation of Teachers has repeatedly taken the Trump administration to court over student loan forgiveness, a program created in 2007 to encourage people to enter and remain in public service jobs, despite the burden of student debt.
The program wipes out a borrower’s remaining federal student loan balance after 120 monthly payments while working in public service — typically the equivalent of 10 years. Nurses, police officers and teachers working for eligible employers are among those who can qualify.
Three-quarters of the American Federation of Teachers’ nearly 2 million members are eligible for the program, according to a spokesperson for the union.
The lawsuit specifically criticizes the Education Department’s handling of the buyback program, which lets borrowers who’ve worked in public service for at least 10 years make retroactive payments for the months when their loans were in deferment or forbearance. Those months can then count toward forgiveness.
The lawsuit describes a slow process, inching forward at “a snail’s pace,” that created a backlog of 88,000 pending applications. Borrowers wait months and sometimes years for the federal government to process their buyback requests.
“Buybacks since they started have always taken a very long time,” said Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors.
The backlog of buyback applications nearly doubled between April 2025 and March 2026. That increase came as the Trump administration sharply reduced staffing at the Education Department. A federal watchdog found the department lost at least 40% of its workforce in the first three months of 2025.
One of the plaintiffs, Jennifer Jessel, owes approximately $50,000 in student loans. She was on track to reach 120 payments that would qualify her for public student loan forgiveness by June 2025. But the lawsuit says the Department of Education placed her loans into involuntary forbearance in September 2024, pausing her payments and making so that she needed to use the buyback program to make up the missed months.
Jessel applied for the buyback program in July 2025. She says she wants to pay the government.
“But I can’t because they won’t process my paperwork,” she said on Friday.
She described the difficult task of juggling mounting costs like childcare, food and rent along with student loans.
“It would be a miracle if I can find a position in public service that provides a high enough salary to cover all of those expenses,” she said.
The teacher’s union is not the only group to raise alarm bells. Several senators and members of Congress have raised concerns. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Ayanna Presley signed onto a letter in June pressing the Department of Education to commit to a date for clearing out the backlog.
And Sen. Ed Markey was among the speakers at Friday’s event. He noted the tens of thousands public service workers in Massachusetts counting on the promise of student loan forgiveness.
“These are the people building a brighter future for students and communities and the Trump administration is treating their public service like a check it can cancel,” he said.
It’s unclear how long it will take the Department of Education to process all the pending requests, but at the current rate some estimate it could take two to three years for the government to get through them all.
There is no way for borrowers to check the status of their requests, according to the Department of Education.
“But we will respond to your request by email as soon as possible,” the Federal Student Aid website reads.
This story has been updated with a statement from the Education Department.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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