Incarcerated Students Caught in Crosshairs of Trump War on Education Department
On March 11, 2025, the federal Department of Education (ED) announced the purge of nearly half of its employees, leaving students reliant on federally insured student loans facing processing delays and potentially predatory loan servicers now unshackled from oversight. But no students were more at risk than those in prison because they can’t easily call or email a loan servicer. Nor can they log onto a website with information about their accounts.
The staff cuts were ordered by Pres. Donald J. Trump (R), who followed up with an executive order on March 20, 2025, directing ED Secretary Linda McMahon to dismantle the agency and “return oversight to the states”—leaving in limbo some 700,000 prisoners who became eligible in July 2023 for Pell education grants, which are not administered by states.
Under former Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D), ED’s “Fresh Start” program brought any prisoner’s delinquent student loan into good standing—a critical prerequisite for Pell Grant eligibility, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Nov. 2022, p.19.] Now that the program has ended, incarcerated students, like all others, must typically make nine consecutive monthly payments of at least $5 in order to restore a delinquent account.
Even if a prisoner can satisfy that requirement, how does he check his loan status before applying for a Pell Grant? To whom is that application sent? What happens if it isn’t processed? ED’s Office of Ombudsman received 300,000 complaints about the agency’s services in 2024 alone. But that office’s staff has been cut in half, and the rest ordered gone as soon as possible.
Congress created ED and must approve any plan to shutter it. Yet there was zero pushback to the President’s directive from the GOP majority in the United States House or Senate. Those same lawmakers also passed a budget blueprint cutting $330 billion from education programs, further endangering prisoners’ access to education funding.
Reinstating Pell Grant eligibility for prisoners was part of the First Step Act passed by Congress in 2018, during Trump’s first term. Under its provisions, ED had approved 64 programs offered by 24 colleges and universities to prisoners as of December 2024. Whether that will help any prisoners now, however, is apparently an open question.
Source: Open Campus, USA Today
As a digital subscriber to Prison Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login