This past summer, borrowers were shocked to find that the Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) Tracker on studentaid.gov had disappeared. The Tracker allowed borrowers who are working toward IDR Forgiveness to know exactly how many of their payments had been counted toward the mandatory number of years in repayment until their remaining balance would be forgiven. Strangely, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Tracker remained for those borrowers, but it seemed frozen, only to be reactivated a short while later. All of this prompted significant confusion and consternation for borrowers, leading to outrage from advocates, including Senator Elizabeth Warren. In response, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon assured Senator Warren that the IDR Tracker would return. Those assurances, however, have turned out to be false.
Recent court documents indicate that the Department of Education has no intention of restoring the IDR Tracker. The documents are related to a lawsuit from the American Federation of Teachers alleging that the Department is harming borrowers by failing to provide timely service. They reveal a backlog of unprocessed PSLF Buyback and IDR plan applications—to the tune of hundreds of thousands. When asked how the Department was tracking borrowers’ progress towards IDR Forgiveness, they responded “ED no longer employs a regularly scheduled process for assessing whether a borrower has reached the qualifying number of months for a discharge. Instead,[...] ED contracts with several loan servicing companies, which as relevant process student loan applications, track the status of existing student loans, and report data to ED.” Ironically, one has to read the footnotes for a more concrete statement about the IDR Tracker, which the document refers to as an “online progress-checker”: “ED currently has no plans to resume using the tool.” In short, instead of the Department of Education tracking progress, they expect loan servicers to do it—some of whom are the same servicers that have been penalized in the past for poor performance and misleading borrowers.
.png)
