Public Citizen has won another major lawsuit against the Trump administration.

Last year, we sued to prevent the regime from weaponizing a federal program that provides student-loan forgiveness for borrowers who go into public service work.

A federal judge recently ruled that the weaponization of that program — a project overseen by Trump’s education secretary, the former professional wrestling magnate Linda McMahon — is unlawful.

This is one of 46 lawsuits (and counting) that Public Citizen has filed against the administration since Trump returned to power.

While the legal system can move slowly, in many of these cases, we have already either won outright, gotten a preliminary ruling that limits or delays whatever bad thing the regime is trying to do, or forced the administration to reveal information.

We have no intention of giving up the fight as our cases make their way through the courts and as we file new lawsuits.

If you can, please donate today to support Public Citizen as we continue standing up to the Trump regime.

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Here’s more about our win in this important case:

• In 2007, Congress passed bipartisan legislation — which was then signed into law by President George W. Bush (a Republican, by the way) — to create the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program.

• The PSLF program helps make it possible for people to go into, and stay in, public service work. The program has helped public school teachers, first responders, social workers, military personnel, librarians, government workers, people who work at homeless shelters and food banks, nurses and other employees at nonprofit hospitals, people who provide services to survivors of domestic violence — the list goes on and on.

• This is no handout. To qualify, borrowers must work a full ten years in a full-time public service job (defined as most federal, state, and local government jobs and jobs with specific kinds of nonprofit organizations) and they must make regular payments that entire time. Only then can they apply to have any remaining debt forgiven.

• The program is an important way to encourage people to go into public service work, where pay is generally less than what the private sector offers.

• Rather than try to make the PSLF program run more smoothly and help more Americans, the Trump administration issued new rules to discourage people with student loans from taking jobs with nonprofits the regime doesn’t like.

• In March of 2025 — amid a flurry of cruel, senseless, or outright illegal executive orders — Trump directed the Education Department to deny loan forgiveness under the PSLF program to any borrowers who work for employers engaged in “substantial illegal activities.” That might sound reasonable, but only for as long as it takes to realize two things.

• One, deciding what “substantial illegal activities” means is exclusively up to loyalists Trump has installed at the Education Department, including MAGA extremist Linda McMahon.

• Two, the Trump regime has already made it very clear that it considers certain things — like helping immigrants, helping trans kids, valuing diversity, and organizing Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights to criticize or protest the regime — to be “illegal.”

• Public Citizen and co-counsel Student Defense represented Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights; the American Immigration Council; The Door — A Center of Alternatives, Inc.; and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in challenging the administration’s PSLF rules.

As Public Citizen’s Cormac Early, lead attorney on the case, noted to the national media:

“The court’s ruling is a major victory for those who work in the public interest and the communities they serve. People who devote their careers to public service and non-profit work deserve access to loan forgiveness on the terms Congress promised, without the threat of retribution from the Trump administration.”

As noted above, we have filed 46 lawsuits (so far) against the administration since Trump returned to power. Are these lawsuits alone enough to fully defeat Trump and MAGA? Of course not. But are they a meaningful part of the pushback that is the only chance we have to collectively save our country? No doubt about it.

What you and Public Citizen are doing together matters. What hundreds of other organizations, big and small, are doing matters. What millions upon millions of our fellow Americans are doing matters. We believe that to our core. We take solace in that. And we draw inspiration from that. We hope you do, too.

If you can, please donate today to support Public Citizen as we continue standing up to the Trump regime.

Anything you can chip in — $5 or $25, $50 or $100, $500 or even more — will make a difference right now.

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If you’ve donated to Public Citizen before, thank you. If a donation is not right, we understand. Either way, thank you for being part of Public Citizen.

For justice,

- Lisa Gilbert & Robert Weissman, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen


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