Nevertheless, one of the defining characteristics of that period was the world-wide shut down, a halting of much of what we thought of as normal — hanging out in large crowds, working from the office, or even shopping at our local grocery store. It was as if a gigantic machine ceased activity. All the gears stopped spinning, conveyor belts halted and, honestly, the earth began to heal — if even for a few weeks.

But student debtors also experienced a lesser-discussed phenomenon. So did our families and communities. This country faced widespread loss of life, food was hard to come by and many American families were struggling. President Donald Trump’s first administration was forced to act — to pause all federal student loan payments. There were no debates about relief “costing taxpayers” or claims that “you took out a loan, you should pay it back.” There was simply action. And although, since then, the process of “returning to normal” has been anything but normal — our country continues to slide into authoritarianism and the rich have gotten far richer — student debtors can’t shake the years we spent free from having to oil the student debt machine with our hard-earned money. What did we learn? The federal government doesn’t need our student debt payments at all.

So then, how should we grapple with the fact that Biden was subsequently responsible for reinstating student loan payments in debt-ceiling negotiations with Republicans? How do we contend with the reality that student debt is surprisingly missing from most Democrats’ agendas today? Compare this to the fact that Democrats once jumped at the opportunity to champion student debt relief, and millions of distressed debtors are left scratching our heads. The student debt crisis has worsened since the last payment pause, not improved.

Thankfully, at Debt Collective, we organize with and for debtors — regardless of which political party holds power. Politicians are, in truth, supposed to work for us. That’s why we’re saying the quiet part out loud: We need an immediate pause on all federal student loan payments and interest — and we need it NOW. There’s a laundry list of reasons why a pause is a logical move. Borrowers have been forced out of SAVE, servicers are making grave errors on people’s accounts, and the DOE has slashed nearly half its staff. In essence, the Trump administration has dismantled much of the infrastructure responsible for administering student loans while simultaneously demanding repayment. It’s like they’re opening the passenger side door of a car destined for the junk yard and instructing us to jump right in.

But we’re no strangers to upheavals. Debt Collective has its roots in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis — in Occupy Wall Street. We’re not afraid to seek solutions even if others scoff at our requests. That’s because we’re aware that movements often blossom out of dire circumstances. And we don’t have to reach for brand new solutions to the current student-debt-catastrophe we face. Debtors experienced a pause not long ago. We can experience it once again. What will get us there is demanding that our elected leaders have the political will to change our material conditions. The question is: will you join the fight?

Read on for updates about the student debt crisis and, most importantly, ways to get organized and take action!

Subscribe now

Trump Fired Everyone…Except MOHELA

MOHELA is screwing up again. They’ve falsely informed some debtors that they are delinquent on their payments, despite being in the SAVE Plan forbearance. Many debtors are even receiving erroneous messages from MOHELA claiming that they’re nearing default!

Here’s what’s happening. When these debtors log into MOHELA, they see several months of missed payments that MOHELA now wants them to pay. This can get super expensive super quick. It also raises the question of whether MOHELA is going to accidentally report all of these accounts to the credit rating agencies as delinquent, tanking people’s credit scores and causing all kinds of financial panic and pain.

This could stop someone from getting a mortgage, from renting an apartment, from qualifying for an auto loan, or spike the rate they pay. Have you received any false notices? Please fill out our survey.

Dysfunction at the DOE

There are widespread reports from people on track to get PSLF that a large number of qualifying payments towards PSLF have suddenly been removed from the PSLF tracker on studentaid.gov. Some people are reporting that all of their qualifying payments are gone, along with the employer certification forms and paperwork they have previously submitted.

Unfortunately, there’s even more mayhem to report. The Department of Education screwed up at least 6,000 people’s IDR payments, charging debtors more than they should have. Instead of fixing the issue, the DOE is telling the impacted debtors they have to do extra work to fix the problem themselves and reapply for IDR.

Once again, if you or anyone you know has experienced these headaches, please fill out our survey. This is yet another reason why we need a pause on all federal student loan payments.

Student Debt Delays Homeownership

The housing industry has a new study out showing how student debt makes it difficult to save for a downpayment by up to 16 years on average (depending on the local housing market).

Good News Travels Fast

The Sweet vs. McMahon lawsuit is officially the largest class action lawsuit against the government in history, winning over $23 billion in student debt cancellation for over 450,000 people. This lawsuit surpasses lawsuits against big tobacco, and it’s brought by consumers instead of by state AGs.

What makes this win so important is that it is a prime example of the power of organized debtors. This relief didn’t come from politicians or the DOE having a change of heart. In fact, one of the first major steps in this fight happened when 15 borrowers, defrauded by Corinthian Colleges, came together and went on a debt strike. Together, they helped create what later became Borrower Defense to Repayment — a form and process that the Department of Education eventually adopted on its website.

These brave organizers also happened to be some of the first members of Debt Collective. This should be a clear sign to politicians that student debt relief is hugely popular. Let’s hope they take heed.

As as we enter Black August — a commemoration of Black political prisoners in the United States and beyond — we decided to discuss the connections between the punitive, punishing components of student debt and mass incarceration itself.

Why is it important to discuss mass incarceration and abolition?

Debt Collective isn’t just interested in canceling all student debt, medical debt, carceral debt and back rent. We also want free college, medical care and housing for all. We want repair. You see, abolition isn’t just the absence of police and prisons — it’s also the presence of what actually keeps our communities safe, which is access to universal public and reparative goods.

In this live, we spoke with Dr. Saudi Garcia — an Afro-Caribbean, queer, first generation immigrant with a deep passion for justice and liberation for her home, the island of Ayiti (Dominican Republic and Haiti), its people and its diasporas. Grounded in equity, abolitionist and healing ethics, Saudi expresses that passion through her racial equity work in her community and through her work as Program Director at Scholars for Social Justice.

The student loan system is broken!

From August 10-15, student debtors around the nation will take collective action to pressure our elected officials to pause student debt payments and interest. We need to make our voices heard, and making this demand collectively will amplify our voices!

RSVP to our upcoming events. See you there!

Get more from Debt Collective in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Imagine that you’re a passenger on a sinking ship. The captain tells you to jump in a lifeboat, but once you do, you realize the lifeboat has holes — and it’s sinking even faster. This is how it feels to be a student debtor right now.

One month ago, loan servicers started sending notices to millions of student debtors on SAVE telling them to switch repayment plans. But when we surveyed SAVE debtors, they told us that switching plans left many of them worse off than before. Of the 1,670 student debtors on SAVE we surveyed, 50% reported that switching plans would cost them an average payment increase of more than $500 per month. In an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, nearly 2 in 5 Americans don’t have $400 in the bank for emergencies. How are student debtors supposed to pay $500 more every month?

More than 130,000 student debtors have called on the White House to pause payments and interest and provide immediate relief to millions of debtors. We don’t need another bill, we need relief — from impossible monthly bills, ballooning balances, and a repayment system in constant flux. We need a payment pause NOW.

This August 10-14, join Debt Collective and Student Debt Crisis Center (SDCC) for a Week of Action to demand a payment pause. We’ll start with a virtual day of action targeting Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other NY Members of Congress. We’ll also train debtors to share their stories by writing op-eds and speaking with the press. Finally, we’ll host a National Call to update everyone on the status of our member-led litigation in the Havens case and break down what these latest developments could mean for SAVE debtors.

RSVP to 8/10 New York Day of Action

RSVP to 8/12 Media & Op-Ed Training

RSVP to 8/13 National Call to Demand a Payment Pause

We need debtors like you to pressure Congress and Trump to pause all federal student loan payments and interest. RSVP to our upcoming Payment Pause Week of Action events, and read on for updates on our campaigns to cancel debt across higher education, healthcare, and housing!

Higher Education

This month, our team met in NYC to dream, strategize, and organize debtors for a payment pause! NY Assemblymember Emily Gallagher and Congressional nominee Claire Valdez joined our NY Debtors Assembly to share their own experiences with debt and hear directly from debtors about the ways they’ve been impacted by the dysfunctional student loan system. We also held a NY Debtors Caucus meeting the following week to discuss campaign updates and plug members into our upcoming NY Day of Action.

We also worked with Debt Collective members being forced off of SAVE plan to submit legal declarations attesting to the ways their families are being impacted by the Department of Education’s failure to reinstate REPAYE once SAVE was struck down, despite no court ruling that REPAYE was illegal. These legal declarations were accepted by the judge and will support the ongoing Havens v. Department of Education case led by Debt Collective members to demand the cancellation they are legally owed and the reinstatement of REPAYE. If this case has a hearing, it will likely take place during our August Week of Action, and its outcome could change the game for student debtors demanding a payment pause.

Stay tuned for more updates on the Havens case, and join our National Call to Demand a Payment Pause on Thursday, August 13 to plug into the campaign. We need you in our fight!

Healthcare

Today marks 61 years of Medicaid, the public health insurance program that ensures more than 70 million Americans receive free or low-cost medical care. Medicaid allows people to get the care they need with dignity even if they don’t make much money, and this program saves countless lives every year.

One year ago this month, the Trump administration mounted the largest attack on the program in U.S. history, using the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” to strip more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) while funneling hundreds of billions of dollars toward deportation and war.

For the last few months, we’ve been organizing in Nebraska, where the Trump-friendly state government started rolling out these healthcare cuts eight months before most other states. The Nebraska Department of Health & Human Services officially starts kicking people off the Medicaid rolls in waves next week — and these same cuts are coming for the rest of us at the end of 2026.

Wherever you live, we need you fighting back with us. Fill out our HealthWatch Interest Form and we’ll loop you in on our work organizing against fascist attacks on lifesaving public infrastructure for universal public healthcare and medical debt abolition.

Housing

Our team has been working behind the scenes to build our campaign to Ban RUBS (Ratio Utility Billing Systems) in Los Angeles. This past month, our organizers brought dozens of tenants associations across the city together to demand an end to these abusive junk fees.

Meanwhile, our Tenant Power Toolkit use continues to grow. Roughly one in five tenants facing eviction in Los Angeles County are now using the Toolkit to file responses to their eviction paperwork. Meanwhile, our presence in the Bay Area continues to expand. Our team now hosts three in-person clinics (in conjunction with tenant organizations and legal service providers) in the East Bay, while we have an exciting expansion plan in the works in the South Bay. Stay tuned for more updates on our campaigns to build tenant power and hold corporate landlords accountable and ways to take action!

Upcoming Events

50 Over 50 Monthly Call

Thursday, July 30 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

Thursday, August 27 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

Did you know that folks over sixty are the fastest growing demographic of student debtors? We are not aging OUT of our debts – we are aging into them. If you’re an older student debtor or a future older student debtor, join us to build community, discuss strategy and deepen our organizing work.

College for All Jubilee School: A History of Fighting for Free College

Thursday, July 30 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Join Higher Ed experts Mark Huelsman and Michelle Miller-Adams to discuss a (recent) history of the free college fight and “College Promise” programs in the U.S. We’ll also explore free college models, research, and ongoing policy efforts.

Final Friday Flow

Friday, July 31 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Friday, August 28 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the last Friday of each month, these gatherings are designed to remind us that the path to debt abolition and collective liberation begins within. Through guided somatic and movement-based practices, we’ll transform exhaustion into power, fear into vision, and pain into purpose.

New Member Call

Wednesday, August 5 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Curious about the Debt Collective and how we’re organizing to abolish debt? Our New Member Call is a space to learn who we are, what we’re fighting for, and how you can plug in. Whether you’re brand new or have been following our work for a while, this call is a chance to get grounded, ask questions, and connect with others who are ready to challenge the debt system together.

Higher Ed Monthly Meeting

Wednesday, August 5 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

If you’re wondering what’s going on with your student loans or how to get involved with the Debt Collective’s higher education campaigns, come join us at our monthly office hours. We’ll cover updates in student loan policy, what to do if you’re in default or on the SAVE Plan, and how to get involved with our campaigns for debt cancellation.

Payment Pause New York Day of Action

Monday, August 10 10am ET / 7am PT, 12pm ET / 9am PT, and 2pm ET / 11am PT

Between conflicting deadlines, payment increases, and rampant loan servicer errors, it’s never been more clear: we need an immediate pause on all federal student loan payments. Join our New York Day of Action at 10am, 12pm, or 2pm ET to call Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other New York Members of Congress and demand a payment pause.

Payment Pause Media & Op-Ed Training

Wednesday, August 12 7pm ET / 4pm PT

To address ongoing harm and call for debt cancellation, we need a payment pause NOW. How can we share our individual debt experiences to break through the noise and bring media attention to the student debt crisis? Join Debt Collective’s creative media strategist Maddy Clifford and published author Kristin Collier for a media and op-ed training, where we’ll discuss

best practices writing and pitching op-eds for publication and speaking with the press.

National Call to Demand a Payment Pause
Thursday, August 13th 7pm ET / 4pm PT
Debt Collective members, supporters of Student Debt Crisis Center, and student debtors around the country are leading the litigation fight to halt the illegal transfer of debtors off of SAVE and onto other expensive repayment plans no one can afford. Join our joint National Call for a debrief on court developments, and learn how you can join the fight for a pause on all federal student debt payments and interest.

College for All Jubilee School: How to Win
Thursday, August 13th 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT
This final session of the College for All Jubilee School series will look forward to discuss how we can win tuition free public college, dignified labor conditions, academic freedom, and debt cancellation.

In this discussion, I was joined by expert, Vanesa Contreras Capó. She is a feminist, professor, unionist, and animal rights activist based in Puerto Rico. Vanesa spent many years organizing and writing about power, care, resistance and the worlds we’re trying to build. In this live, we explored how debt is used as a tool of discipline and what it takes to build a movement rooted in connectivity and care.

Student Debt Crisis Updates:

Over the past few months — mainstream media, influencers, and even the Department of Education’s messaging — has left borrowers with more questions than answers. Many were pushed to leave the SAVE plan on July 1st, often without fully understanding their options.

The frustration and anger people are feeling right now is justified!

You are not a loan. Time to get organized!

• Please fill out the below survey and share your experience with us:

Bit.ly/SAVE26

• The entire student debt crisis is a dumpster fire by design! We need a payment pause as soon as possible! Please sign our petition:

Bit.ly/PaymentPause26

• COME SEE US IN PERSON.

Debt Collective will be in New York — July 14, 2026!

RSVP Here

Join us for a debtors’ assembly to discuss changes occurring in the federal student loan system this summer, to transform shame into solidarity with other debtors, and to learn more about what we’re working on.

This meeting will be in person only. Details will be sent to registrants via email – dinner will be provided on a first come, first serve basis! See you there.

Get more from Debt Collective in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Last week, a lawsuit brought by Debt Collective members and student debtors forced the Dept. Ed to admit that the true deadline for SAVE debtors to transition to a new plan is not July 1, but September 29 at the earliest. SAVE debtors who have been stressing out about today’s deadline can breathe easy for now — you still have three months, and maybe even more, to select a new repayment plan.

In other good news for debtors, Trump’s illegal PSLF rule change — which would have stripped debt-relief eligibility from anyone Trump disagrees with politically — was struck down in court yesterday, just hours before it would have gone into effect. Last week, a federal judge also blocked the Department of Education’s attempts to limit federal student loans for “nonprofessional” graduate degrees.

The student loan system is a dumpster fire by design, and the Education Department’s many administrative failures are only adding more fuel to the fire. That’s why we’re calling for an immediate pause on federal student loan payments. Can you add your name to our call?

Read on for updates on our campaigns to organize debtors across higher education, healthcare, and housing, and more opportunities to take action this coming month!

Higher Education

This was a huge month for student debtors! In early June, we brought several SAVE debtors and Debt Collective members to DC to tell Senator Bernie Sanders about the many ways student debt has impacted their lives. We also met with staffers from the offices of Senators Gillibrand, Markey, Warnock, Fetterman, Kaine, and Schumer about our campaign to demand a pause on federal student loan payments.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit brought by Debt Collective members like you continues to move through the courts. These plaintiffs are requesting that the court prevent the Department of Education from forcing debtors into more expensive plans without cancelling the debts of those who have already qualified or allowing debtors to enroll in more affordable plans like REPAYE.

It’s worth noting that no court ever ruled REPAYE illegal. The Department of Education simply did not follow the required rulemaking process, leaving debtors at risk of permanently losing interest subsidies, qualifying months toward cancellation which can’t be re-earned, delinquency, default, and long-term credit damage.

This administration’s decisions have inflicted immediate and irreparable harm to student debtors. Debtors have shared with us that they have had to miss car payments, forgo saving for retirement, change employers, skip meals, and lose stable housing in order to make their student loan payments.

This broken system cannot continue. Join us next Wednesday 7/8 at 7:30pm ET and the following Wednesday 7/15 at 7pm ET for rapid response updates on changes to the federal student loan system and our campaign for a payment pause. Together, we can fight collectively for the debt cancellation that we deserve!

Healthcare

As the higher ed crew gears up to fight for a federal student loan payment pause, our healthcare team has been focused on building the response to the massive federal healthcare cuts taking effect across the country with the rollout of Trump’s budget bill.

For the last few months, we’ve been organizing with members and partners on the ground in Nebraska, where Trump’s pals in the state government set up some of the cruelest elements of the federal healthcare cuts to kick in at the start of May — a full 8 months before most of the country. Montana and Arkansas are about to follow suit, with both states rolling out federal means-testing requirements designed to kick millions of people off their healthcare starting today, July 1.

Nebraska, Montana, and Arkansas are canaries in the coal mine. The cuts they’re rolling out early will take effect through the rest of the country on January 1, and the attacks on Medicaid and other lifesaving social infrastructure are going to send things off the rails fast. The loss of health insurance for millions of working class people, the collapse of safety-net clinics and rural hospitals, and the ongoing explosion of medical debt will affect everyone.

That’s why we’re building an organizing project to look out for our neighbors at risk of losing their healthcare, stand with healthcare workers whose jobs are under threat, and fight for a universal public healthcare system that works for everyday people. Fill out our HealthWatch Interest Form to get plugged in!

Housing

On June 1, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Virgil Square Tenant Association’s RUBS strike in Los Angeles, CA! One year ago, tenants supported by the Los Angeles Tenants Union and the Debt Collective began collectively withholding thousands of dollars in monthly utility payments to Equity Residential, the fifth-largest corporate landlord in the nation.

In their first year on strike, the Virgil Square Tenant Association has won back more than $25,000 in refunds to tenants, received local and national press coverage, and encouraged tenants in Seattle to take action against their landlord’s use of RUBS. Virgil Square Tenant Association plans to continue striking until they receive transparency from Equity Residential for how their utilities bills are calculated.

In the aftermath of the California primary election, we’re calling on Democrat Xavier Becerra to support statewide rent control in California. California’s Tenant Protection Act doesn’t cover all tenants in CA, allows high rent increases, and will expire by 2029. California’s next governor must take action to address the state’s housing crisis by committing to strengthen and make permanent the Tenant Protection Act and repeal the anti-tenant Costa-Hawkins Act, which severely limits rent control in California.

Stay tuned for more developments on our campaign for rent control in California and our work to hold corporate landlords accountable to tenants!

Upcoming Events

New Member Call

Wednesday, July 1 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Curious about the Debt Collective and how we’re organizing to abolish debt? Our New Member Call is a space to learn who we are, what we’re fighting for, and how you can plug in. Whether you’re brand new or have been following our work for a while, this call is a chance to get grounded, ask questions, and connect with others who are ready to challenge the debt system together.

Higher Ed Monthly Meeting

Wednesday, July 8 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

If you’re wondering what’s going on with your student loans or how to get involved with the Debt Collective’s higher education campaigns, come join us at our monthly office hours. We’ll cover updates in student loan policy, what to do if you’re in default or on the SAVE Plan, and how to get involved with our campaigns for debt cancellation.

College for All Jubilee School: University Boards – Autocrats or Puppets?

Thursday, July 9 8pm ET / 5pm PT

The boards that govern U.S. universities are unaccountable to faculty, staff, or students, but growing institutional debt is shifting this balance of power. In this session, professors Timothy Kaufman-Osborn and Constance Penley will break down the ways that debt shapes decision-making in higher education and how this vulnerability can be exploited to democratize university governance.

Rapid Response: Federal Student Loan Changes

Wednesday, July 15 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Join us to discuss the different changes that are occurring in the federal student loan system this summer and to learn more about our campaign for a total federal payment pause. We’ll discuss recent changes to repayment plans, campaign updates, and ways that members can get involved.

College for All Jubilee School: Democratizing Knowledge Creation Beyond the University

Thursday, July 16 5pm ET / 2pm PT

50 years of budget cuts, privatization, and political repression have limited what can be taught and researched at U.S. universities. In this session, professors and AAUP organizers Jennifer Ruth and Karim Mattar will use Palestine as a lens to highlight the ways faculty members, AAUP chapters, and unions are taking action to defend academic freedom.

College for All Jubilee School: The Fight for a Free CUNY

Thursday, July 23 5pm ET / 2pm PT

CUNY was once tuition-free. As the largest public urban university in the U.S. continues to be an epicenter for anti-capitalist struggles, CUNY scholars and organizers Noelle Mapes, Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed and Travis S.will offer a counter-institutional strategy that anchors radical intersectional study within universities where indebted people are amassed.

New York Debtor’s Caucus Meeting

Thursday, July 23 6pm ET / 3pm PT

This will be a space for New Yorkers to get together and discuss their debts and strategize to build the world that we want. At the meeting, we’ll discuss the recent changes to the student loan system, hear from members of our Payment Pause and College for All working groups, and discuss ways that members can get involved.

College for All Jubilee School: A History of the College for All Fight

Thursday, July 30 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Join Higher Ed experts Mark Huelsman and Michelle Miller-Adams to discuss a (recent) history of the free college fight and “College Promise” programs in the U.S. We’ll also explore free college models, research, and ongoing policy efforts.

50 Over 50 Monthly Call

Thursday, July 30 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

Are you 50 years old or older? Do you have student loan debt? Join our 50/50 meeting for student debtors aged fifty and above to discuss action steps, organizing plans, and build solidarity. Newcomers are welcome!

Final Friday Flow

Friday, July 31 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the last Friday of each month, these gatherings are designed to remind us that the path to debt abolition and collective liberation begins within. Through guided somatic and movement-based practices, we’ll transform exhaustion into power, fear into vision, and pain into purpose.

Also known as Freedom Day or Jubilee Day, Juneteenth is one of the oldest continuously observed Black American holidays in the United States. In 2021, it was officially recognized as a federal holiday.

Juneteenth is a celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. The name combines the words “June” and “nineteenth,” marking June 19, 1865 — the day enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

I joined Christian Simone, Texan, Masters of Social Work and member of our Healthcare Workers Solidarity cohort, to talk about the roots of Juneteenth, the parallels between the past and the present and what Black women can teach us about freedom dreaming.

Further reading:

• What Are Other Names for Juneteenth? The U.S. Is Betraying the Spirit of ‘Jubilee Day’ By Braxton Brewington

• The State of the Student Debt Crisis for Black Women data from Protect Borrowers

• “My Debt Was Canceled — and The World Just Opened Up” Gail Frances Gardner’s Story of Freedom After Student Debt. By Maddy Clifford

• Juneteenth’s DEI Ain’t Freedom: “Diversifying” an economy already obsessed with Blackness is futile. Ownership, not inclusion, is the key to our liberation. By Aaron Ross Coleman

Documentary:

Freedom Dreams: Black Women and the Student Debt Crisis

This important documentary profiles Black women educators and activists struggling under the weight of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, in student loan debt. The title is inspired by scholar and activist Robin D. G. Kelley’s eponymous book, and the film is narrated by former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, a longtime ally of the growing debt abolition movement.

As directors Erick Stoll and Astra Taylor and the film’s cast demonstrate, a lack of intergenerational wealth and persistent wage discrimination force women, and Black women in particular, to borrow at disproportionate rates and struggle with repayment. Reactionary policy decisions have transformed education, long trumpeted as a ladder of upward mobility, into a debt trap.

Call to Action:

Join Debt Collective — the nation's first union of debtors — and fight back against Trump's attacks on student millions of debtors by calling for a pause on federal student loan payments!!

Get more from Debt Collective in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

We spoke with Joseph Strafaci, professor and PhD, about his experiences navigating the student loan system — a dumpster fire by design — and a recent post he made on Reddit, which drew wide attention. Be sure to follow Joseph’s Substack, The Civic Blueprint.

Please help us advocate for debtors by filling out a brief survey and tell us about YOUR experience with the SAVE Plan

By sharing how SAVE ending will impact you and your family, you can help us pressure lawmakers to call for a payment pause!

Get more from Debt Collective in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Her work spans debt abolition, housing justice, racial capitalism, climate justice, and anthropology. We spoke about a range of topics — from the root of the housing crisis to organizing for college that isn’t just free, but freeing.

Hannah recently helped publish a report From Climate Debt to Climate Justice: Debtor Organizing in the Fight for Climate Repair. The report isn’t just an in-depth study, it is also a powerful teaching tool. Be sure to read the introductory excerpt.

Lastly, Hannah will be speaking tomorrow as part of our Jubilee School Series on divesting the university from state violence. University investments (like endowments and pension funds) profit from state violence–weapons manufacturers, private prisons, surveillance technology, and more. This discussion will focus on University of California Move Your Money campaign, and what it might take to begin the process of divesting higher education from state violence.

Get more from Debt Collective in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

From rising utility fees to wars over oil or mass migration driven by natural disasters, the need for global solidarity to confront climate catastrophe has never been more urgent. Countries in the Global North must acknowledge the disproportionate burden countries in the Global South are forced to bear, even as these same countries are the lowest carbon emitters. But what power do we, as ordinary people, have to demand a transformative response to climate change?

Debt Collective founders and our allies are answering this question in a recently released report, which amplifies vital strategies used by social movements around the world to resist unjust debt and climate change in the same frame. Please enjoy the below excerpt from the report, From Climate Debt to Climate Justice: Debtor Organizing and the Fight for Climate Repair, and be sure to share far and wide!

The Unequal Burden of Climate Change in an Era of Record Fossil Fuel Profits

The impacts of climate change are arriving much faster than predicted, and the costs are much higher too. Every time a catastrophic hurricane, flood, wildfire, drought, or heatwave leaves a trail of devastation, we are told how much damage, in dollar amounts, it caused, and what portion of GDP that represents. But these sums typically only reflect loss of property and infrastructure, not the costs of recovery and displacement. Nor do they account for the collateral, or indirect, damage that economists call “externalities”; pollution, species extinction, crop failure, soil and water degradation, loss of flora that act as carbon sinks, etc. Above all, they do not give us an honest picture of the uneven impacts of the damage. Frontline communities with the lowest incomes and the least protection suffer much more than well-heeled households with the resources to insulate and insure themselves. The damage to the former is often immeasurable, which is why the media may report that floods in Bangladesh left tens of millions of people homeless, but that floods in Southeastern Europe caused tens of billions of dollars in damage.

More tellingly, these statistics are hardly ever put side by side with the numbers showing the profits posted by the fossil fuel corporations that are most directly responsible for climate change. Until 2024 and 2025, 2023 was the hottest year in our planet’s recorded history. That same year, U.S.-based oil and gas companies earned $172.8 billion, took back previous pledges to decrease their fossil fuel output that warms our planet, and used tax dollars (in other words, public money and not their own profits) to increase oil and gas production. The year before — 2022 — the six largest Western oil companies made over $200 billion dollars in profit, more money than in any other year in the industry’s history. ExxonMobil alone — the energy company in strongest opposition to decarbonization — made nearly $56 billion and saw its share price rise more than 50%. BP — the energy company that has led industry decarbonization efforts — reversed course on its “beyond Petroleum” initiative, announcing that it would slow its transition plans toward renewable energy generation.

In response, investors poured money into BP, whose stock price rose 10% in the 48 hours after the firm’s announcement. The world’s largest banks continue to fund this dramatic expansion in fossil fuel production, much of it destined for exports to global south countries that cannot afford to fund their own transition to a low-carbon economy. Despite agreements ranging from the 2015 Paris Accords to 2021’s Net Zero Banking Alliance, the top 60 banks globally have committed $3.3 trillion to companies expanding fossil fuels since 2016.

As the world’s largest banks and energy companies scramble to increase their investments in fossil fuels, frontline communities all over the world are disproportionately paying the price. Poor people who are geographically vulnerable are living with, and dying from, the most violent effects of climate change. These communities are the least responsible for climate change and yet they are most impacted. Why? As this paper will go on to detail, the answer has a lot to do with the financial system that enriches fossil fuel companies and their investors while it burdens so much of the rest of the world not only with the violent and destructive effects of climate change, but also with crushing levels of debt.

Just as the temperatures hit record highs, so, too has total global debt, reaching $315 trillion in the first quarter of 2024. Most of that debt is held by corporations and investors, who use the capital to create even more wealth for themselves. But most of the burden falls on those who cannot afford to repay, and whose poverty only deepens as a result, even within the world’s wealthiest countries, where class, race and gender inequalities push people underwater. Just under one-fifth of that $315 trillion represents household debt owed by ordinary people, not cities, countries, or corporations. How much of that sum is entangled with the ruinous impacts of climate change? The business practices of the fossil fuel industry, and the banks, private equity firms, and other major asset managers who fund them have imposed these financial costs on us. And not only our reliance on oil and gas, but also our day-to-day debts, from housing to healthcare, enrich these same companies and financial institutions.

Faced with the might of the world’s largest banks, energy companies and stock markets, what financial leverage do ordinary people have to push for decarbonization and a reparative energy transition? The challenge of combating climate change is so big that ordinary people can seem powerless to confront it. Indeed, when we talk about the challenges of climate justice organizing, we usually talk about how much material power fossil fuel companies or big banks or private equity companies have, and how their influence over our elected officials is arguably the biggest roadblock to transformative climate practice and policy. Can ordinary people wield that level of systemic financial power too? This is one of the questions we set out to answer in this paper.

Who Owes Whom? The Power of Organized Debtors

At the Debt Collective we have one potential answer to that question: regular people around the world actually possess that latent power through our own household debts and relationships to big banks, and we can mobilize it through the collective strength of debtors’ unions, tenants unions, and labor unions working together. We’ll explore that idea later in the paper, but we introduce it here to make the point that while debt is most often understood as a burden and a form of disempowerment, it can also be a form of power!

Fossil fuel companies know the wealth-creating capacity of debt all too well, making full use of more than $6.9 trillion of debt financing since the 2015 signing of the Paris Agreement. In fact, these companies use debt financing to escape the scrutiny they face from activists and regulators on the stock market, and to avoid paying taxes. At the same time, fossil fuel companies have benefited from more than $4.7 trillion in government subsidies, which help guarantee lucrative prices and revenues for their industry. Avoiding taxes while benefiting from such lavish financial support, these companies should be understood as major contributors to government debt, so often evoked to justify cuts to public spending: austerity for we the people, government-backed riches for the fossil fuel industry.

The idea that debt obligations are central to the climate crisis is not new. There is increasing consensus that debt and the climate crisis are interconnected — and that the relationship between them lies at the heart of what is known as the climate justice movement. This paper begins from this consensus and then asks, What are the transformative ideas and organizing strategies that flow from this understanding? What are debt and climate justice movements around the world doing to build power at this intersection?

In these pages you’ll find dispatches from Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, South Africa’s Green Revolutionary Council, the Ni Una Menos and Don’t Pay UK movements, Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development, and more!

Each and every one of these movements — whether explicitly or otherwise — uses what is called a climate reparations framework. Climate reparations looks at the centuries of exploitative relationships between the global north and global south (slavery, colonization, indigenous genocide, resource and labor extraction), and shows that wealthy, industrialized nations owe a debt to poorer countries, peoples, and lands. Climate reparations is the idea that “wealthy, industrialized nations should pay to mitigate the climate emergency, which they caused and which disproportionately affects poorer countries.”

To us and to so many other social movements, the situation is clear. We have to flip the script on who owes what to whom. Climate changers — the governments, corporations, and other institutions who have changed the climate — are the ones who should be on the hook. Their obligation to repair the damage they have caused is indisputable, and that is why we describe their responsibility in terms of an obligation to repay. But it is also clear that our current financial system is not set up to flip this script, so that system needs to be radically rethought and remade, and we do our best to tackle that in this paper as well.

Organizing for climate reparations means centering the analysis, strategies and tactics emerging from the global south — the frontlines of climate/debt struggle from South Africa to Brazil, the Philippines to Argentina to Barbados. By that same token, it also means recognizing that the rich nations of North America and Europe — while they also contain marginalized frontline communities — are the world’s largest carbon emitters (taking historical emissions into account — a list to which China was recently added), and the regions whose financial power, energy consumption, development policies and money (the US Dollar in particular) dictate global financial architectures, at least for now.

Unjust Debt, Disobedience and Climate Justice

While we do our best to summarize the great thinking already out there, especially on sovereign debt and climate change, this paper offers a few new insights as well. First, as the relationship between debt and climate change has become more widely understood, many global activist movements and global governance forums approach debt either as a constraint on poor countries (who cannot afford to invest in climate mitigation or adaptation, for instance) or a moral obligation of rich countries (who owe climate debt and reparations). While these understandings are very important, they are not the only formats for thinking about climate debts, nor are they the only pathways for resolving them. As we’ll explore with social movements in Section III, debt can also be a form of counterpower — providing consequential means for collective disobedience and leverage to force reparations, reparative public goods, and definancialization.

Second, debt affects people’s daily lives across multiple scales. While the relationship between sovereign debt and climate change is now a well-established feature of elite commentary, there has been much less attention to how municipal debt and household debt are determined by climate change impacts, and how each can be affected by the other. Municipalities are forced to take on more debt to offset the infrastructural damage from floods and storms, while the costs of repayment are passed on disproportionately in the form of taxes and reduced services to the most vulnerable communities. An ever larger share of household debt comes from unpayable energy bills, soaring insurance premiums and auto loan notes, and rapidly increasing prices for food items produced through high-carbon processes.

At the Debt Collective, we have a track record of organizing the collective power of debtors to refuse unjust or illegitimate debts. Climate debt, for most of us, falls into this category. Unlike most debts levied for access to social goods that should be freely available, it is a debt that should be paid, but only by the climate changers themselves. We hope that readers will be persuaded that our actions, as a debtors union of households, could add this new dimension of pressure to ensure a fair and just outcome.

Adapted from the report: From Climate Debt to Climate Justice: Debtor Organizing and the Fight for Climate Repair by Maizah Ali, Hannah Appel, Erik Hazard, Andrew Ross and Matt Schneider, published Winter 2026. Copyright © 2026 by UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Institute on Inequality and Democracy. All rights reserved.

― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Earlier this week, New York Mayor Mamdani announced that his administration is focused on “the worst landlords in NYC” and prepared to transfer ownership of buildings suffering chronic neglect to “responsible stewards…even the tenants themselves.”

This is exactly what should happen to bad landlords across the country. When landlords neglect routine maintenance to cut costs, use opaque utilities billing systems to raise rents, and abuse tenants by charging junk fees, they should have their properties taken away. As long as landlords are driven by profit, housing will be treated as an investment to extract wealth from tenants rather than a public good that everyone needs to survive.

A housing system built around maximizing returns for shareholders will always put profits ahead of affordable homes for tenants. The same is true of healthcare systems that profit off of patients while exploiting healthcare workers, as well as education systems that force students and school districts into debt for the benefit of Wall Street billionaires.

We must organize as tenants and debtors to combat homelessness and eviction, hold predatory landlords accountable, and build a world where housing is for people, not profit. That’s why we’re building a union of debtors to fight for the reparative public goods that working people need to live and thrive. Read on to learn more about how we’re organizing debtors across higher education, healthcare, and housing, and more opportunities to plug in this coming month!

Higher Education

The federal government continues to turn a blind eye to the student debt crisis, forcing debtors to play defense at a time when we are facing more financial challenges than ever. Recently, the Senate voted to leave President Trump’s new PSLF policy in place, allowing his administration to take PSLF away from people who work at organizations that they disagree with. This vote took place without even calling upon individual Senators to put their positions on the record. This loss shows us how much work is still left to do.

Meanwhile, the Department of Education continues to email student loan debtors pushing them (well ahead of the legal deadline) to switch out of the SAVE repayment plan forbearance into more expensive plans. We continue to organize with debtors to challenge these changes in the courts, develop policy answers to this terrible decision (which comes as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) and help debtors find the signal through the noise.

Despite these setbacks, we are working to put forth an ambitious policy vision that looks into the future to ensure our right to learn. We are working on two big, ambitious goals: free college and student debt cancellation. We are doing this by learning together at our free popular education program Jubilee School, organizing and getting to know each other at our monthly meetings, sharing our debt stories with each other and the press, and hiring for a new Campaign Director (apply today if interested!).

Healthcare

It’s no secret that the US healthcare system is a disaster. The basic facts have been clear for a long time: healthcare in the US costs too much, we spend much more than similar countries for far worse health outcomes, and a majority of Americans are either living with medical debt or postponing care we need to avoid getting stuck with bills we can’t pay. Most of us know our commodified, profit-driven system is broken, but that’s not enough to get us out of this bind on its own. For that, we need to keep growing the organized power of everyday people fighting for a different vision of healthcare.

As the Trump administration continues its attacks on Medicaid and other lifesaving public programs with funding cuts, we’re organizing local events and campaigns that both respond to the immediate consequences of these attacks — the loss of health insurance for millions of people, the collapse of safety-net health clinics and rural hospitals, and the continuing explosion of medical debt — and build our collective power and capacity in the fight for a public, reparative, and truly universal healthcare system in which medical debt doesn’t exist. Want to get involved? Fill out this HealthWatch Interest Form to stay in the loop!

Housing

The Virgil Square Tenants Association is about to reach a major milestone — June 1st will mark a full year on RUBS Strike! RUBS, or Ratio Utility Billing Systems, is a method of utility billing that allows landlords to skirt responsibility for major repairs while raising tenants’ rent. It also greatly disincentivizes landlords and tenants from making energy or water-usage efficiencies in their buildings.

Our work on RUBS isn’t stopping at the building level. We are talking to tenants across Los Angeles and working actively to demand that the City of LA take action to ban the use of RUBS altogether. We’re closing out the month by bringing tenant leaders from tenants associations city-wide together this weekend to take stock of our work on RUBS and discuss next steps in our campaign to ban it!

Practices like RUBS will continue to crop up as long as landlord power greatly outweighs that of tenants, and the concentration of landlord power in ever fewer hands worsens this for all of us. This month, corporate consolidation took a major step backward (for tenants) as two REIT landlords, Equity Residential and AvalonBay, announced a merger that could create the largest landlord in the country overnight.

We are taking action to bring scrutiny to this merger. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is actively considering removing the exemption of REITs from pre-merger review. We have submitted comments demanding the FTC close the REIT (or real estate investment trust) merger loophole and protect tenants by holding corporate landlords accountable. Stay tuned for more updates from our tenant power campaign, and fill out the Landlord Reporting Tool to help us hold corporate landlords accountable!

Subscribe now

Upcoming Events

Writing Your Debt Story Part II: A Short-form & Op-Ed Workshop

Part II Tuesday, June 9 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

Author, educator, and Debt Collective fellow Kristin Collier will lead a two-part writing workshop focused on telling your debt story in short forms such as op-eds. The workshop will be loosely organized around the framework of seeing red: the unique, important ways in which debtors see the world, and the stories we must tell in order to build the world we deserve.

In part I, we discussed focus, structure, language, and research. In part II, we’ll use our initial ideas to craft pitches for outlets, receive feedback, and support each other through the publication process.

Final Friday Flow

Friday, May 29 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Friday, June 26 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the last Friday of each month, these gatherings are designed to remind us that the path to debt abolition and collective liberation begins within. Through guided somatic and movement-based practices, we’ll transform exhaustion into power, fear into vision, and pain into purpose.

Movement Monday

Monday, June 1 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the first Monday of each month, these gatherings invite us to pause, breathe, and reconnect with our bodies as a vital part of organizing for debt abolition and collective care. We’ll check in with ourselves and each other through accessible, grounding somatic practices that support nervous system regulation, accountability, and mutual support.

Higher Ed Monthly Meeting

Wednesday, June 3 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

If you’re wondering what’s going on with your student loans or how to get involved with the Debt Collective’s higher education campaigns, come join us at our monthly office hours. We’ll cover topics including the latest updates on student loan policy, what to do if you’re on the SAVE plan or in default, and how to get involved with Debt Collective’s campaigns for free college and debt cancellation.

New Member Call

Wednesday, June 3 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Curious about the Debt Collective and how we’re organizing to abolish debt? Our New Member Call is a space to learn who we are, what we’re fighting for, and how you can plug in. Whether you’re brand new or have been following our work for a while, this call is a chance to get grounded, ask questions, and connect with others who are ready to challenge the debt system together.

College for All Jubilee School: Divesting the University from State Violence

Thursday, June 4th 8pm ET / 5pm PT

College should not only be free, it should be free-ing – but university investments profit from weapons manufacturers, private prisons, surveillance technology, and more. Join Debt Collective co-founder and UCLA professor Hannah Appel to learn about the University of California Move Your Money campaign and what it might take to begin the process of divesting higher education from state violence.

College for All Monthly Organizing Meeting

Monday, June 8 7pm ET / 4pm PT

We’re asking Representatives and Senators to co-sponsor the College for All Act. Please join us as we prepare for meetings with Representatives and their staff, plan our strategy, and fight together for our Right to Learn!

College for All Jubilee School: Funding Free College by Taxing the Rich

Thursday, June 18th 8pm ET / 5pm PT

Led by Massachusetts Teachers Association President Max Page, this session will explore the history of college costs and resources for making debt-free public college a reality by taxing the very wealthy.

Borrower Defense: The Landscape, Updates & Workshop

Tuesday, June 30 8pm ET / 5pm PT

Our Monthly Borrower Defense Calls are designed for borrowers navigating fraud, misconduct, and student loan injustice. Each call provides timely updates on the Borrower Defense landscape, current litigation, and policy developments alongside practical guidance on asserting your rights and filing claims.

Well, at Debt Collective, we’re excited to announce a free, downloadable and accessible report that does just that: From Climate Debt to Climate Justice: Debtor Organizing and the Fight for Climate Repair.

This report was written by Hannah Appel, Andrew Ross, Matt Schneider, Erik Hazard and Maizah Ali. We’ll be sharing art and excerpts from the report in the coming days. In the meantime, we spoke with Maizah Ali about climate justice, art and “flipping the script”on our extractive global economic system. Who owes what to whom?

Maizah Ali is an illustrator, community artist, and aspiring scholar who graduated from UCLA with degrees in International Development Studies and Cognitive Science. Currently, she works as a teaching artist with Stay Arts, an arts education non-profit organization serving the Southeast LA community. She will continue her academic studies at LSE in the fall, where she plans to research the intersections of geopolitics, critical technology studies, and multimedia storytelling.

Report Abstract: How are climate change and debt – whether sovereign, municipal or household – related under racial capitalism? When faced with a warming planet caused by centuries of racial capitalism, how are people organizing the necessary ideas and social movements to fight back? What are the alternatives and solutions to racial capitalism-driven climate change proposed both by movements on the ground, and by those in (or near) halls of power around the world, from multilateral institutions to national governments to research universities?

This paper offers an accessible introduction to many of the large-scale transformative ideas out there, from green central banking to degrowth, from climate reparations to de-dollarization.

In addition, based on interviews with Argentina’s Debt for Climate, Britain’s Don’t Pay UK, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, Chile’s Ni Una Menos, and the South Africa Green Revolutionary Council, this paper shares tactics and strategies used by social movements around the world to resist debt and climate change in the same frame.

Get more from Debt Collective in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

We spoke about the corporate landlord structure and the apex predator of the housing market: Real Estate Investment Trusts or REITs.

• Join us to demand that the FTC close the REIT merger loophole and protect tenants by holding corporate landlords accountable! Bit.ly/FTCProtectTenants26

We also referenced a book called Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis.

Get more from Debt Collective in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Sociologist Dr. Amber first coined the term “debtfluencing” in a Substack post last year, arguing that an entire ecosystem of influencers has emerged online to normalize #debtpayoff culture. From advocating extreme frugality and skipping meals to juggling multiple jobs or publicly sharing massive debt balances for shock-and-awe engagement — as opposed to as a form of resistance — these debt-fluencers are rarely interested in collective solutions.

Even those who’ve built platforms with millions of supporters remain singularly focused on paying debt off as an individual pursuit, despite the deeper truth that no one should be in the red for pursuing education. No one should carry medical debt because they were diagnosed with cancer. No one should owe back rent to a behemoth corporate landlord either. What debtfluencers fail to amplify is the history of our profit-driven education, healthcare, and housing systems. They don’t disclose that lifelong student debt is virtually unheard of in most wealthy countries, or that American politicians have the legal authority to provide mass debt relief to millions. Instead, they’re obsessed with becoming one of the lucky few who beat the odds.

To make matters worse, finfluencers — debtfluencers’ partners in crime — are equally prevalent, pushing high-risk retail investing or even gambling without disclosing that they are often being paid by financial institutions. Finfluencers may also be shaping young people’s financial futures by pushing quick fixes to the affordability crisis. Spoiler: the “fix” is usually a payday loan or an expensive money management course.

Understanding unjust debt as a form of social control is essential. Americans owe $18 trillion in household debt, yet the ruling class blames it on personal failure rather than a failed system. This “personal responsibility” framework is partially pervasive because billionaires have captured our media landscape. It’s a dangerously slippery slope that leads right into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy. If debtors are framed as individuals who are simply “bad with money,” it opens the door to prejudice (an effective distraction).

For example, women and Black communities are disproportionately burdened by every type of unjust debt — “personal responsibility” logic subtly suggests that entire groups are financially irresponsible or spending recklessly. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Like poverty, unjust debt is a policy choice. If debt can accumulate for what should be public goods, then it can also be abolished.

Personal-responsibility narratives also uphold the illusion that our financial system is a level playing field and that we’ve merely lost some fairytale “fair game.” That logic justifies why a handful of billionaires hold half of the world’s wealth while shifting the blame onto individual debtors. It keeps us from building class solidarity, being outraged about wage theft — the most pervasive form of theft in the country — or recognizing that the ultra-wealthy routinely use debt to their advantage, leveraging it to generate more wealth while often avoiding taxes altogether.

Should you stay informed about what’s happening in the student debt landscape? Absolutely. But it’s equally important to remember the bigger picture: working-class Americans need full and complete debt cancellation and college, healthcare and housing for all. So if you’re an online creator courageous enough to share your debt story, why not alchemize your anger towards collective solutions?

A TikTok creator by the moniker of Cassanova Brown (@drcassanovabrown) is doing just that. He recently revealed his stressful financial situation to his 300k followers. This vulnerability inspired others online to do the same, which has resulted in what’s now called the #AgeofDisclosure series on TikTok. The series is rooted in the Black community, but open to all. Participants share job loss, high debt balances, or housing insecurity. His series has ultimately helped people develop a deeper class analysis, while remembering they’re not alone. In a world where financial stress is one of the leading drivers of suicide, and online spaces are full of smoke and mirrors, these kinds of conversations can help save lives!

If you’re ready to tell your story, to come up with collective solutions and to demand a better economic system, join us for our upcoming two part Writing Your Debt Story series. In the meantime, this post also provides insider updates in the higher education space — for debtors, by debtors. Because Debt Collective has got your back!

Student Debt Updates

Private Student Debt Collectors Pivot to Targeting Immigrant Communities

The Trump administration has re-hired the same private debt collectors previously fired by the Biden Administration for gross misconduct. Now, instead of hounding student debtors for payments they can’t afford or slapping them with exorbitant fines, these collectors have pivoted to targeting immigrants using an opaque law which was introduced by Bill Clinton, but never enforced.

According to The Lever, immigrants have been fined to the tune of 1.8 million dollars, or approximately $1000 a day, for remaining in a country that’s epically failed to enact comprehensive immigration policy. The Department of Homeland Security works in cahoots with private collectors to issue threatening letters in the hopes of scaring people to “self deport.”

What does this tell us? The Trump administration understands that unjust debt is a form of social control. This isn’t just about money, this is about using the threat of debt as leverage against vulnerable communities.

When It Comes to the SAVE Repayment Plan — Sit Tight & Stay Tuned

Although headlines have declared Biden’s SAVE plan dead, there’s much more to the story. The Trump administration’s Department of Education sent out communications claiming the SAVE plan is illegal — it’s not. Some borrowers have abandoned ship, but we’re reminding debtors to hold tight, especially because we’re currently fighting for relief promised to borrowers who spent years making payments under SAVE. For more information, watch our interview with Austin Hinkle about his work as former Section Chief of the Office of Students and Young Consumers at the CFPB as well as his work leading the ongoing litigation to protect the SAVE Plan.

Department of Education is Still Pushing a Messy Transfer to the Treasury

To refresh your memory, Linda McMahon’s plan to transfer the massive student debt portfolio to the Treasury is a terrible idea. In the past, when the Treasury tried to work with student debtors to rehabilitate 5,729 accounts, they only successfully rehabilitated 8 of those accounts. This was during a full year of trying. But that’s exactly why Trump and McMahon want to move student loans to the Treasury in the first place.

Forget Trump’s shallow interest in “affordability,” his administration wants to take money right out of working class people’s bank accounts. To make matters worse, the current undersecretary of Ed has proposed a solution to this fiasco: he wants to “modernize” the process, which means having AI do the dirty work. But AI isn’t a viable solution to their mismanagement of the student loan portfolio.

We need to call on the Trump administration to implement a one-year pause on federal student loan debt payments and collection services for all federal student debtors. Sign this petition and share far and wide!

Federal Student Aid FSA in a Hiring Blitz

FSA is looking to hire exactly 334 people to process the remaining backlog of roughly 300,000 borrower defense claims. Ironically, that number 334, is the exact number of people that FSA got rid of through the “reduction in force” in the early stages of this Trump administration. You really can’t make this shit up.

THIS Senate Vote Could Protect PSLF

The Trump administration has proposed a new rule that effectively says public service workers must align with the administration’s political views or risk losing their path to a debt-free future. That has serious consequences — not just financially, but for democracy and public service itself.

The right wing knows an indebted doctor, an organizer in fear of wage garnishment, or a teacher in danger of defaulting on her student loan is easier to control than a worker without debt. Compare this new rule to the fact that the Trump administration offered a pathway to student debt relief to recruit ICE agents and it becomes abundantly clear what the right’s vision for the future is — and it’s bleak.

Here’s the good news: Trump’s new PSLF rule can be overturned through the Congressional Review Act (CRA), but only if enough senators act now.

Debt Collective and our allies secured 32 Senate Democrats to call for a CRA vote. This is a great time for Dems to advocate for their constituents and protect one of the few pathways to relief for people who’ve devoted their lives to public service.

Help us hold Congress accountable. Contact your Senators and urge them to support a CRA vote to protect PSLF immediately.

“Just Go Into the Trades”

Don’t want to be burdened by student debt? Go into the trades, they say. Well, as we’ve previously stated, Trade schools are also debt trap. Now you have an awesome article you can send your great-aunt when she suggests you become an electrician instead of studying philosophy. Because the real question is: why can’t you do both without going into debt for the rest of your life?

Visit DebtCollective.org to join our upcoming calls or to become a member.

The Trump Administration has barely started their half-baked transfer of the $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio from the Department of Education to the Treasury — but to absolutely no one’s surprise — they’re already running into major problems.

When student debtors default on their loans, they have options for getting out of default, some of which don’t require paying back a single dollar. The Department of Education is already terrible at walking debtors through their options, but the Treasury will be even worse. They aren’t set up to do account rehabilitation — they do forced collections.

The Department of Education already experimented with transferring loans to the Treasury in a 2015 pilot study. The Treasury was given a pool of 5,729 debtors to manage. One year in, only eight of those debtors had their accounts rehabilitated. That’s less than 0.001% success rate.

Knowing this was a colossal failure, why would Dept. Ed continue to push this transfer? The answer is banal in its cruelty: they want to punish borrowers who can’t afford to pay their debts.

From weaponizing PSLF eligibility against people and organizations based on their politics to killing the SAVE plan through backdoor court deals, the Treasury transfer is just the latest in a series of attempts to control debtors through chaos and disinformation. But we are not helpless in the face of these attacks.

Together, we have the power to fight back!

Tomorrow is May Day. On this day, also known as International Workers’ Day, we celebrate the achievements of organized workers whose movements gave us the 8-hour workday, overtime pay, and the ability to bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions.

Like workers, debtors too can organize and bargain collectively for debt cancellation, free college, and more. Read on to learn more about how we’re organizing debtors across higher education, healthcare, and housing, and more opportunities to plug in this coming month!

Higher Education

We know that many of you might be feeling overwhelmed by all that’s happening with federal student loans right now. We’re fighting several defensive battles at once.

The Trump Administration is flooding the zone by trying to take Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) away from people based on their politics, transfer parts of the student loan portfolio to the Treasury, and get rid of the most affordable repayment plan (SAVE) through backdoor deals in the courts. That’s why we’re organizing debtors to ask our representatives to stick up for PSLF, pause payments while the Trump Administration splits up the portfolio and leaves debtors without crucial information about their own loans, and defend SAVE in court.

We’re also keeping our focus on the long game: a right to learn that includes free college, student loan cancellation, and accountability for schools that defraud their own students. Join us on 5/5 for our monthly Higher Ed meeting and office hours to learn more, and come to our monthly College for All campaign meeting on 5/11 to get more involved!

Healthcare

This time last year, we were fighting Trump’s attempts to cut massive federal funding from Medicaid, SNAP, and other lifesaving public programs. Federal cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act will force more than 15 million Americans off healthcare in the next few years, resulting in unnecessary deaths, more medical debt, shuttered rural hospitals and safety-net clinics, and the further erosion of trust in public goods and services.

This week we’re on the ground in Nebraska, where these Medicaid cuts kick in tomorrow — eight months earlier than in most states. Starting May 1st, Nebraskans on Medicaid will be forced to navigate “work requirements” designed to overwhelm them with a flood of confusing paperwork and forms, frequent reporting deadlines, and bureaucratic red tape. These work requirements have been set up for working-class people to fail, even those who easily meet the terms and requirements.

Nebraska is on the front lines of this battle, so we’re holding in-person HealthWatch events this weekend in Lincoln and Omaha to start building an organized response here. But the Medicaid cuts — and the broader collapse of our public infrastructure — are coming for us all, and it’s not just Medicaid recipients who should care. Want to get involved as we start to plan similar HealthWatch events across the country in the coming months? Fill out this HealthWatch Interest Form and we’ll loop you in.

Housing

The Tenant Power Toolkit hit a major milestone last month! Thanks to a pilot program with the Superior Court of Los Angeles, use of our toolkit grew an astounding 39% year-over-year, representing one out of every five evictions in LA — the nation’s largest court system.

Meanwhile, our campaign against Ratio Utility Building Systems (RUBS) continues to grow. This month, we co-hosted a virtual event convening tenants and advocates from Los Angeles to Seattle who are fighting RUBS in their buildings. Over 100 attended this call to hear from tenants advocating to change local laws to ban the practice, tenants currently on RUBS strike, and advocates from the National Consumer Law Center.

Last week, tenants from the Virgil Square Tenants Association in Koreatown, Los Angeles met with Alex Ferrer, a UCLA researcher who helped build our Landlord Reporting Tool. These tenants are 11 months into a RUBS utility bills strike! Alongside other Equity Residential tenants, they are pushing to change L.A. City law to end RUBS in the city permanently

Finally, Debt Collective joined dozens of organizations across the country to urge the Federal Trade Commission to implement a strong rule against junk fees in rental housing, like RUBS. Junk fees for utilities, trash service, and more have been used as a cash cow by landlords trying to drain extra profits from their tenants, particularly those with rent controls. We’ll keep fighting at the state and national level against these unfair and deceptive practices.

Upcoming Events

SAVE Plan: Rapid Response Update

Thursday, April 30th 8pm ET / 5pm PT

The judicial fight over the future of the SAVE federal student debt repayment plan has left millions of working people in limbo. Meanwhile, many debtors are wondering what to do – should they get out of the SAVE Plan? If so, when? We will be joined by Public Goods Practice to explain these developments and discuss next steps for debtors and for the movement.

Movement Monday

Monday, May 4th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the first Monday of each month, these gatherings invite us to pause, breathe, and reconnect with our bodies as a vital part of organizing for debt abolition and collective care. We’ll check in with ourselves and each other through accessible, grounding somatic practices that support nervous system regulation, accountability, and mutual support.

Higher Ed Monthly Meeting & Office Hours

Tuesday, May 5th 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

If you’re wondering what’s going on with your student loans or how to get involved with the Debt Collective’s higher education campaigns, come join us at our monthly office hours to discuss student loan policy, the fight for free college, the SAVE Plan, defaulted loans, and more.

New Member Call

Wednesday, May 6th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Curious about the Debt Collective and how we’re organizing to abolish debt? Our New Member Call is a space to learn who we are, what we’re fighting for, and how you can plug in. Whether you’re brand new or have been following our work for a while, this call is a chance to get grounded, ask questions, and connect with others who are ready to challenge the debt system together.

College for All Jubilee School: Plutocratic Governance

Thursday, May 7th 6pm ET / 3pm PT

Join us as we discuss how billionaires from finance and big tech adopted more oligarchical roles in US politics and higher education with Charlie Eaton, Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced.

College for All Monthly Organizing Meeting

Monday, May 11th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

We’re asking Representatives and Senators to co-sponsor the College for All Act. Please join us as we prepare for meetings with Representatives and their staff, plan our strategy, and fight together for our Right to Learn!

Borrower Defense: The Landscape, Updates & Workshop

Tuesday, May 26th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Our Monthly Borrower Defense Calls are designed for borrowers navigating fraud, misconduct, and student loan injustice. Each call provides timely updates on the Borrower Defense landscape, current litigation, and policy developments alongside practical guidance on asserting your rights and filing claims.

Writing Your Debt Story Part I: A Short-form & Op-Ed Workshop

Thursday, May 28 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

Author, educator, and Debt Collective fellow Kristin Collier will lead a two-part writing workshop focused on telling your debt story in short forms such as op-eds. The workshop will be loosely organized around the framework of seeing red: the unique, important ways in which borrowers living in the red see the world, and the stories we must tell in order to build the world we deserve.

In part I, we’ll look at sample writing, discuss focus, structure, language, and research, and do some writing and experimentation together. You’ll leave the session with a plan to write a short essay or op-ed about your experiences. In part II (June 9th), we’ll use our initial ideas to craft pitches for outlets, receive feedback, and talk about how we’ll support one another through the publication process.

Final Friday Flow

Friday, May 29th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the last Friday of each month, these gatherings are designed to remind us that the path to debt abolition and collective liberation begins within. Through guided somatic and movement-based practices, we’ll transform exhaustion into power, fear into vision, and pain into purpose.

Need more details? RSVP for our upcoming SAVE Plan Rapid Response Update Call

Go here Public Goods Practice to learn about Austin Hinkle’s important work.

Get more from Debt Collective in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

As James Baldwin reminds us, the reverberations of American slavery are not subject to our recollections. “It is not a question of memory,” Baldwin writes. “Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.”

Our leaders wish to believe that America’s debt to Black people died with the enslaved themselves. As Senator Mitch McConnell put it in 2019: “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago when none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.”

Yet slavery lived on, long after emancipation. “For a century after the Civil War, Black folks were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror — a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader McConnell,” essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates quipped during his Congressional testimony on reparations. “It is tempting to divorce this modern campaign of terror, of plunder, from enslavement, but the logic of enslavement, of white supremacy, respects no such borders, and the guard of bondage was lustful and begat many heirs.”

McConnell’s view of history is myopic. Yet even if we adopted his nearsightedness, we still see that Black people are owed innumerable billions. If not for slavery, then for its “many heirs”— for convict leasing, vagrancy laws, redlining, poll taxes, debt peonage, and all the vestiges of Jim Crow. Yes, reparations is for bondage, but is not limited to it. The crimes extend into the here and now, extend far into the land of the living.

In McConnell and his acolytes, we see America’s absurd selective history. This nation proudly champions presidents born in the 1940s, yet sheepishly ignores the crimes inflicted on Black chain gangs in the 1940s. We haughtily celebrate the greatness of “the American Century,” yet refuse to acknowledge what America was during most of that century — an apartheid state. The issue is not that Americans are completely ahistorical; it is that they only like the history which flatters them.

When Black folks bring up the history of our ancestors, when we bring up how they lashed our backs, there is inevitably a backlash. It is this recoiling, this phobia of the past, which has made it impossible for the United States to proffer recourse and atone for unrequited toil. The result is ceaseless racial blight.

Black folks have long since paid our dues, but we are never paid our due. We languish in debt because America won’t pay its debts to us. Chased by cash-for-gold outlets, swarmed by payday lenders, stalked by used-car dealers, hunted by pawn shops, mobbed by title loans, Black communities are circled by every species of loan shark. From Compton to Charleston, hip-hop radio stations blare baritone ads threatening, “SETTLE YOUR IRS DEBT NOW,” as this cruel country, which enslaved our ancestors, Jim Crowed our elders, and mass incarcerated our kids, audaciously mails out tax notices telling Black folks how much we owe America. Madness!

Everywhere you look, the case for reparations resounds viscerally. It glares like the disheveled men in homeless encampments on MLK Boulevards from Atlanta to Los Angeles. It mourns like the GoFundMe pleas for the funeral expenses of Black grandmothers, who, after a lifetime of caring and loving, now face the indignity of being tossed in a pine box because they cannot afford to die. It is as vivid as the slaveholders inked on our dollar bills, as tactile as the plantations carved into the back of our coins. And yet, even if America were to pay up, even if it handed over its slave-themed dollars to the descendants of slaves, this would not be enough.

For if the US repaid Black families and did nothing more, we’d still reside in capitalism — that ravenous, bloodthirsty hierarchy fueled by consuming the people beneath you. If we only closed the racial wealth gap, we would simply move Black people from being on the dinner menu to being diners at the table. We would still subsist on others’ flesh and blood. What good would there be in repaying the victims of cannibalism if we continue eating humans? What justice is there in merely climbing the ranks from hunted to hunter?

America’s crime is not only slavery. It is not only the failure to pay reparations. It is also the failure to transform our economy away from being a human-engulfing maw. The formerly enslaved did not envision abolition as mere inclusion in America’s immoral economy. They did not just want their “piece of the pie,” because they knew the pie was made from pieces of them. Rather, the Freedmen envisioned the project of emancipation and repair as a wholesale reinvention of the American economy.

As Duke historian Justin Leroy notes, Black thinkers in the 19th century “conceived of freedom not only as the end of the institution of slavery and the equitable incorporation into the political forms of American democracy, but also, crucially, as a project to rework the relationship among land, labor, and capital.”

Leroy describes this holistic vision as an “economically-inflected understanding of freedom” that sought to inaugurate a “union between expansive participatory democracy and redistributive political economy secured by an egalitarian state.” This vision of Black liberation, what Du Bois called “abolition democracy,” is inseparable from any true program of repair.

It is only through this combination of reparation and transformation that America can pay off its debts and rest assured that it isn’t creating new ones — it is only through repentance and renewal that we can all truly be free.

Aaron Ross Coleman is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, The Nation, The Intercept, and more.

He writes the Freedom Studies Substack, a new publication exploring abolition, economic democracy, and what freedom can actually look like in practice.

→ Join early readers here:

Freedom Studies

Exploring the liberation, abolition, and emancipation

By Aaron Ross Coleman

PRESS RELEASE: The Administration that brought you Official Trump Coin, Trump Accounts (aka 401 pre-Ks), and 50-year mortgages has created a new financial tool that will continue to Make America Rich and Safe Again.

Thanks to a Historic Private-Public Partnership, your FICO score will now become your Fair Under Capitalism’s Opportunity score, aka FUCO score. These scores will make all Real and Responsible Americans RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE!! No more excuses!

Your FUCO score will be calculated as shown below:

Old Woke FICO score vs Fair Under Capitalism’s Opportunity score

Your FUCO score will still be somewhere from 300 to 850 to help Major Banks approve your housing, loans, credit, and Life, just like FICO but BETTER! This is a win for all True Patriots!

We cannot confirm how your Patriot record is calculated because National Security says so. But it will happen in real time using the latest corporate, military, and non-rigged voting machine insights. Owning $TRUMP and Trump NFTs will boost your score, while credit card transactions at Gay Bars and halal Food Trucks will hurt you.

There is no affordability crisis because it is a Democrat HOAX! Therefore, a Low FUCO Score will be PROOF that a person is in Antifa (a gang we recently made up) or a childless cat lady. High FUCO means a Bright Secure Future for the USA!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

— END OF PRESS RELEASE —

Yes, that was fake. Har har har.

But this dystopian satire is based on more facts than you may realize.

Surveillance capitalism is ramping up, between social media monitoring, cameras on every building, and your boss spying on you. But before computers were even a thing, one industry paved the way to you feeling like you’re always being watched (because you are) — consumer credit reporting.

As Josh Lauer explains in his book, Creditworthiness: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, “It was not the welfare or protection of the state that spawned the first mass surveillance systems in the United States; it was the security of capitalism.”

The implications for debtors and those who could take on crushing debt at any time (read: all of us) are massive. Here are just a few ways that credit scores and reports can impact all of us in the name of patriotism…

FACT: Credit rating agencies are allowed to falsely label you as a terrorist

Imagine going to take out a car loan just to be denied — not because of a missed payment or too many debts, but because they think you are a terrorist. It’s totally legal, thanks to TransUnion LLC v Ramirez.

In October 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that credit reporting agencies can label you a potential terrorist or drug trafficker without your knowledge, even if you request a copy of your credit report. As noted in the dissent, if you wanted this information included in your copy of your credit report, you’d have to pay TransUnion extra.

The case was brought after TransUnion did this to thousands of borrowers based only on a first and last name. Granted, reporting agencies know your date of birth, middle name, the dream you had last night, and much, much more. They may — as a supposed courtesy — send you a letter that says, “btw, we (the guys who could make it impossible to cover your basic needs at any moment) think you might be on a government watch list for some serious shit. And we won’t say whether you can dispute this. xoxo!”

As if life under American Capitalism’s “Opportunity” doesn’t already require that we be “worthy” of incurring a ton of debt at a moment’s notice — on average, an inpatient stay in the hospital costs $3,297 a night, according to 2024 data from KFF. That gets charged on personal loans, credit cards, hospital repayment plans. Even if you emerge on the other side debt-free, you may feel forced to pay higher health insurance premiums for the rest of your life to keep your out-of-pocket max low. Maybe you’ll skip healthcare altogether.

FACT: The credit reporting industry knows that debt is a way to control you

As noted by Josh Lauer in Creditworthiness, “[Credit] bureau operators viewed themselves as something more than purveyors of a mundane business service; they were patriotic agents of social order” [emphasis added].

One of the key myths that upholds this social order which credit rating agencies rely on is the idea that borrowing is an equal exchange between two parties. Thus, a massive corporation has a right to rate you.

Think about how ridiculous that sounds. A large institution and an individual working-class borrower on the same playing field? Let’s be real — when someone borrows from a major bank or even the federal government (the Department of Education effectively operates as one of the largest predatory lenders in the country), the power dynamics are deeply inequitable.

Despite this disparity, the entire system of creditworthiness is built on the assumption of a fair and equal partnership. Credit scores are then treated as objective measures of responsibility rather than reflections of a system that disproportionately benefits lenders over debtors.

Understanding this imbalance is crucial in order to push back against the U.S. multi-billion dollar credit reporting apparatus. A credit rating absolutely shapes aspects of one’s daily life, but it is not a measure of their value or character. Letting go of shame tied to a low credit score — much like student debt taken on in pursuit of education — is an important step toward reclaiming your power. Through a debtors’ union, we can build collective power towards abolishing our debts and the concept of creditworthiness itself.

So how do we push back against credit reports?

While a low credit score is no laughing matter, it’s worth calling out the hypocrisies of a system that doesn’t need to exist at all. The logic behind credit scoring is so arbitrary that you could easily imagine something like a “true patriot credit score” being introduced and carrying just as much weight as the current system. After all, people are sometimes penalized with a lower credit score after paying off their student debt — hardly a rational measure of so-called financial responsibility.

Stepping back, the bigger picture becomes clear: this system is about control. Credit scores function as a way to surveil, discipline and restrict working-class people’s access to basic needs like housing, healthcare and education.

At the same time, there are examples of successful resistance. Organizers in the healthcare space successfully petitioned to remove medical debt from credit reports, challenging the idea that a medical emergency should follow someone financially for years. Even the backlash to this win reveals how much power is at stake — systems don’t push back unless their power is meaningfully threatened.

As bell hooks reminds us, people will try to destroy you precisely because of your potential power. So as we navigate the financial hellscape, it’s important not only to stay grounded in that awareness, but also to find moments to challenge the system with a bit of humor along the way.

Myriam Robinson-Puche (she/her) is a personal finance freelance writer and a member of Debt Collective's Media, Art and Design team. Myriam has written for Morning Brew, MarketWatch, Bankrate and more. She also previously worked as a financial coach.

But the credit rating system doesn’t just have the power to ruin individuals’ lives — it can also impact how institutions and entire cities are run. This is where municipal debt comes in. Cities rely on municipal bonds — debt securities issued by public and private entities — to fund infrastructure and public services. Like individuals, they, too, are “rated” and penalized through credit rating systems that benefit investors over the working class. For example, credit rating agency Moody’s recently moved New York City’s outlook from stable to negative.

This rating is laughably premature, and yet they’ve done it despite the budget being months away from completion. Even though this rating depends entirely on what happens in Albany, which is flush with cash, the credit raters can’t help butting in and ringing alarm bells to undermine an administration trying to serve the working class. Crucially, these agencies disagree with Mamdani on how to use reserves to help the poor and working class. While Mamdani says that the city might need to dip into them to help people out in a difficult time, the rating agencies say that if he does, he will face consequences. Even finance guys agree that the outlook announcement is political in nature.

“Just How Things Work”

When credit-rating agencies like Moody’s send a warning signal, it impacts everything in the city budget, which then impacts everything in the city. Specifically, the threat of a negative outlook or even a downgrade makes it more expensive for NYC to borrow, taking away money from working-class programs and forcing it over to the bondholder class. It’s basically a hidden Wall Street tax.

Cities have to borrow money to pay for things, just like you and me. They have to borrow at punitive rates on complex schedules and be subject to forces of interest rates, market fluctuations and racial capitalist flights of fancy. The municipal bond market is an extractive regime that in principle is supposed to provide the public with liquidity for infrastructure using the magic of market efficiency, but in practice is just a sprawling way to blame victims of the system and make tax free-interest payments in the process. The credit rating is at the center of it all.

This is all well-documented. Michel Feher has written about how governments have to subordinate themselves to credit raters. Alberta Sbragia writes how the municipal money chase leads to a debt wish. Eleni Schirmer has called bonds the great unequalizer of public education, while Muntaner and Wozniak say they harmfully indebt children. Destin Jenkins calls them bonds of inequality. Claire Cahen recently noted the disciplinary force credit ratings have. The CCI has called it all unhealthy. I’ve called it a straight jacket that socialists in municipal power have to put on.

The impact of the credit rating shouldn’t be underestimated, even if it feels hard to understand for most of us. For those few in the know, debt service is a quantitatively small part of operating expenditures that, to most wonks running budget offices, is “just how things work.”

Jim Lebenthal, the municipal bond evangelist famous for his shlocky commercials, said in one spot that “you can’t take a shower, take the subway, go to school…without a municipal bond touching your life.” It’s true, though like most ruling-class capitalists of that (and any) era, he probably never considered the notion of unwanted touching.

Everyone in the budget office and in the municipal government lives in fear of the credit rating. Any expenditure that goes too high, any slight transformation, or any sudden fiscal move could cause the credit raters to ding you. It could be a report that moves your outlook to negative. It could be a downgrade. It could be the rumor of a possible downgrade coursing through the chats and emails where the credit raters work. It’s like a gun to your head — the shot could come at any moment.

When that happens, it’s like a sickness that comes over the municipality’s material conditions, making everything more difficult. In financial terms, more money must be paid in order to get the money needed to pay for things, all of which ultimately will have to be paid back with interest. But in cultural and political terms, public confidence wanes. The administration is seen as irresponsible, and its critics run story after story like an acidic drip of budgetary insults which have the sound and feel of truth, because who really knows how all this works? We have to trust the experts! And the credit raters are just a neutral, technocratic temperature taker, right? They’re “agencies” for god’s sake, impartial watchdogs for upstanding fiscal and monetary health!

No. They’re businesses too. They hold public governments to the same standards as private companies. They punitively rate. They take at least 1% of the principal just on school bonds. They were a key node in crashing the economy in 2008.

Public Policy Made by Private Enterprise

Even if the Mamdani administration thinks that Moody’s rating was unfair, there’s not much they can do about it. The credit raters can do what they like with impunity. In a 2018 article, Roger Biles recounts the power of ratings agencies over local governments:

When a Denver school district disputed the ratings it had received from Moody’s and stopped paying fees for the service, the agency relied on information available in the public domain and issued unsolicited ratings that continued to be available publicly. The school district filed a lawsuit against Moody’s but lost when a federal court upheld the agency’s right to publish its ratings publicly. Concurring with Moody’s characterization of its ratings as “opinions,” the court grounded its ruling in the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech.

Moody’s put out hurtful analyses against the wishes of the public school district who paid for the service. The schools sued them. The courts decided the credit raters could publish the reports because they’re “opinions,” and preventing them from doing so would violate their free speech rights. Biles continues:

Armed with such legal protection, the ratings agencies have continued to issue unsolicited credit ratings and bill the cities for the service; fearing the consequences they might suffer for future solicited ratings, cities have usually paid for services they failed to request.

Biles’s thesis is that private financial firms basically run local governments that are supposed to be public. Their laws are “public policy made by private enterprise,” and it’s been this way since long before the rise of neoliberalism! What Lebenthal said is true — cities and states and localities of every kind have to sell themselves as commodities on Wall Street to get the money they need for infrastructure. There’s no other way to do it.

Investing in the Common Good

The municipal bond regime and its credit rating apparatus is deeply rooted in the United States, but there are alternatives. These policies and practices were begun and maintained, so they can be weakened and ended. The first step, as always, is knowing that you have a problem and understanding practices like bonding, credit ratings, and municipal debt. Learning about these systems is best done in groups: if you’re a teacher or professor, join the Debt Collective’s Educator Debt Cancellation Caucus. You can also refer to resources like our Back to School Finance workshops and the Healthy School Finance worksheet.

In this process of understanding the regime, alternatives pop up on the horizon. A great report from 2024 lays out the histories and possibilities for investing in the common good. I chart a number of them in my new book As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools, such as Minnesota’s tax base sharing programs, Vermont’s Act 60 from 1998, Richard Nixon’s abandoned value-added tax for public education, a national investment authority, a Green New Deal, strategies to invest for the common good like fiscal mutualism, and following up on some of the destroyed promise of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Working-class people can build solidarity and push back against the whole structure that makes the credit rating a threat to delivering for a city’s diverse working class. There are new energies out there to do people’s credit ratings, bonding for the common good, public banks, and cooperative public finance banks. So, before you let a credit score define you — or the city you love — follow the money and ask yourself what’s behind the headlines.

David I. Backer (@schooldaves) is an associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University whose research, organizing, and teaching focus on finance and ideology. He is the author of the recent book As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools (New Press), and writes a weekly newsletter called Schooling in Socialist America.

— Verónica Gago and Lucí Cavallero, A Feminist Reading of Debt

If you’re feeling confused and disoriented by the many recent changes to the student loan system, you’re not alone. To distract from their costly and unprovoked attacks on Iran, Trump and his administration have been flooding the zone with unlawful efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, leaving student debtors holding the bag.

On the heels of killing the SAVE repayment plan through a dubious judicial process, the Department of Education recently announced a blatantly illegal scheme to transfer a portion of the 1.7 trillion dollar student debt portfolio to the Treasury. This transfer could lead to unprecedented data security risks, legal violations, and additional junk fees to cover the cost of debt collection — all while raising student debtors’ monthly payments by hundreds or even thousands of dollars annually.

While gas, utilities, and healthcare costs continue to skyrocket, more than 45 million student debtors — many of whom are already struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living — will be expected to pay the price for the Trump administration’s incompetence. We won’t stand for it.

That’s why we’re calling on the Trump administration to implement a one-year pause on federal student loan debt repayment and collections services for all federal student debtors. The first Trump administration paused payments during the COVID-19 pandemic — there’s no reason why they can’t do it again. Will you join us?

Read on for the latest on our lawsuit to reinstate SAVE, our campaign to abolish rent debt in California, and how you can plug in.

Higher Education

From organizing Debt Collective members to challenge the court decision that killed SAVE to navigating the impacts of the student debt loan portfolio transfer, it’s been a busy month for our team!

On the former, please join us tonight at 8pm ET / 5pm PT for an update on our work to defend the SAVE Plan and how you can get involved. On the latter, we encourage all federal student debtors to open up a case file with your House Representative’s constituent services and request a copy of all of your entire payment history, including payment amount and repayment status details for each month. Even though some of this information is available on StudentAid.gov, many debtors are unable to piece together the various files to access their own loan information. A complete history will allow you to document errors on your accounts, get a record of your loans to document errors that could occur in the future, and disrupt business as usual for Republican lawmakers. Use this tool to look up and contact your Representative.

Not all hope is lost on the student debt cancellation front. Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Department of Education’s stay request in an ongoing class action lawsuit, meaning that more than 200,000 borrowers will receive full debt cancellation within the next year! We are also continuing the fight for College for All through our Jubilee School event series. Join us tonight at 5pm ET / 2pm PT to learn from former Department of Justice Deputy Attorney General Doha Mekki about the ways that colleges and universities might be violating antitrust laws through tuition pricing, and sign up for our upcoming sessions!

Healthcare

As we build an organized response to the implementation of Trump’s devastating cuts to Medicaid and other programs millions across the country rely on to survive, we’re looking to the state of Nebraska first. New Medicaid work requirements which are specifically designed to kick people off their healthcare won’t take effect in most states until January 1 of next year — but in Nebraska, these devastating policies will be in place starting May 1.

That’s why we’re planning a series of Nebraska Health-Watch events and Debtors’ Assemblies with partners across the state in late April, where we’ll discuss how to navigate these new requirements, why they’re happening, and how we can most strategically organize right now to fight for our healthcare and each other. On the ground in Nebraska and want to know more? Fill out this form and we’ll follow up with dates and locations!

If you don’t live in Nebraska but want to get involved, join us virtually next Tuesday at 7pm ET / 4pm ET for Power Mapping the Healthcare System in 2026. We’ll discuss what’s changed in the fight to abolish medical debt under Trump, what hasn’t, and opportunities to build power toward the healthcare system we want and deserve. We know that public healthcare in this country would be cheaper, safer, and more sensible for everyone than the system we have now. Instead, the few public programs we have are being ripped away. We’re not giving them up without a fight.

Housing

Since January 5th, we’ve seen a 20% increase in use of the Tenant Power Toolkit in California due to its inclusion in a study trial! Our Toolkit is helping tenants in California avoid default judgments in their eviction trials — an important first step in buying tenants time to fight their cases.

In response to rampant tenant exploitation by corporate landlords like Equity Residential, we’ve launched the Landlord Reporting Tool to help current and former tenants fight their rent debt charges and document the abusive business practices they’ve experienced in buildings owned by Equity Residential. Our ultimate goal is to build a compelling case for the California Attorney General to enforce existing regulations that would curb these predatory practices and abolish rent debt altogether. If you’re a current or former tenant of an Equity Residential Building, please fill out the Landlord Reporting Tool and we’ll get in touch with you!

Upcoming Events

College for All Jubilee School: Tuition Pricing & Antitrust Law

Thursday, March 26th 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Join guest speaker Doha Mekki, formerly the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s antitrust division, to learn how corporate consolidation in education drives up tuition and how antitrust enforcement can help protect affordability.

Rapid Response: SAVE Plan Update

Thursday, March 26th 8pm ET / 5pm PT

We’re organizing debtors to demand that the Trump administration protect and fully implement SAVE, deliver cancellation to qualified debtors, and restore access to SAVE repayment benefits like lower monthly payments. Join us and our partners at Student Debt Crisis Center and Public Goods Practice to discuss next steps for debtors and for the movement.

Final Friday Flow

Friday, March 27th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Friday, April 24th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the last Friday of each month, these gatherings are designed to remind us that the path to debt abolition and collective liberation begins within. Through guided somatic and movement-based practices, we’ll transform exhaustion into power, fear into vision, and pain into purpose.

Power Mapping the Healthcare System in 2026

Tuesday, March 31st 7pm ET / 4pm PT

We know the U.S. healthcare system isn’t working for us — so why is it so difficult to change, and why does it keep getting worse? Join us as we resume our Power Mapping the Healthcare System series to discuss what’s changed under Trump, what hasn’t, and where we can build power in this moment of crisis to fight for the healthcare system and the world we want.

New Member Call

Wednesday, April 1st 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Curious about the Debt Collective and how we’re organizing to abolish debt? Our New Member Call is a space to learn who we are, what we’re fighting for, and how you can plug in. We’ll cover what the Debt Collective is and how we organize, the campaigns we’re running, and ways for members to get involved.

Office Hours: Student Loans & Filing Your Taxes

Monday, April 6th 12pm ET / 9am PT

This session will cover some Frequently Asked Questions related to tax filing and student loans, and will also provide information about free tax filing resources from GetYour Refund.

Movement Monday

Monday, April 6th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the first Monday of each month, these gatherings invite us to pause, breathe, and reconnect with our bodies as a vital part of organizing for debt abolition and collective care. We’ll check in with ourselves and each other through accessible, grounding somatic practices that support nervous system regulation, accountability, and mutual support.

PSLF Action Call

Tuesday, April 7th at 7pm ET / 5pm PT

Please join us as we discuss upcoming action items related to securing and defending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

Office Hours: Debtors in Default

Wednesday, April 8th 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Tuesday, April 21th 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

Join us as we discuss options for debtors with federal student loans in default. We will cover options that require repayment, like rehabilitation and consolidation, as well as options that do not, like loan cancellation. We will also provide information about free tax filing resources from GetYourRefund.

College for All Jubilee School: An Abolitionist History of the University

Thursday, April 16th 5pm ET/ 2pm PT

Abolitionist University Studies authors Eli Meyerhoff, Abbie Boggs, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz will provide an overview of what abolitionist perspectives provide for thinking about the university in our moment of fascist authoritarianism and war. Together, we’ll explore questions of debt and capture to make sense of the perceived inevitability of capitalism and expand our imaginative horizons to see the world from the perspectives of those who have resisted debt and capture.

Office Hours: Parent PLUS Loans

Thursday, April 16th 6pm ET / 3pm PT

If you have Parent PLUS loans, you may need to take steps well before July 1, 2026 to make sure your loans qualify for lower payments and cancellation. Come to these office hours to learn about the situation facing PLUS borrowers and take the first steps together to consolidate.

50 Over 50 Monthly Call

Thursday, April 16th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Are you 50 years old or older? Do you have student loan debt? Join our 50/50 meeting for student debtors aged fifty and above to discuss action steps, organizing plans, and build solidarity. Newcomers are welcome!

Antifascist Organizing Against Attacks on Professors, Speech, & Curriculum with CAHE

Friday, April 17th 2pm ET / 11am PT

On National Day of Action, higher education leaders will share their firsthand experiences organizing campaigns, mobilizing communities, and defending academic freedom under increasingly hostile conditions. This panel was organized by Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE)’s anti-fascism caucus and will be co-facilitated by Debt Collective Visionary Escalator Dr. Shamell Bell.

College for All Jubilee School: The Erosion of Academic Labor with HELU

Thursday, April 23 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Colleges and universities are core to our communities and economy. How do we grow the higher ed labor movement while building consciousness of ourselves as workers? Join speakers from Higher Education Labor United (HELU) to explore strategies for building connections and trust between different kinds of workers so that we can move in coordinated action in the future.

Borrower Defense: The Landscape, Updates & Workshop

Tuesday, April 28th 8pm ET / 5pm PT

Our Monthly Borrower Defense Calls are designed for borrowers navigating fraud, misconduct, and student loan injustice. Each call provides timely updates on the Borrower Defense landscape, current litigation, and policy developments alongside practical guidance on asserting your rights and filing claims.

Sound familiar?

For the one in four Americans trying to keep track of their student debt, let alone figure out how to get the debt canceled, this kind of confusion is their daily life.

Loan servicers lose track of how much debtors owe, keeping people on hold for hours. Private lenders deny cancellation even when they’re legally required to discharge debts. The news is full of flood-the-zone-like headlines and social media influencers giving unclear advice. Policies shift, lawsuits unfold, and debtors are left trying to piece together what it all means.

If you felt whiplash just trying to keep up last week, last month or last year — you’re not alone. You’re not a loan.

As debtors and our allies sift through the chaos, it’s critical not to lose sight of the bigger picture: this system is not normal. We’ve been taught to accept student debt as a fact of life, but in many industrialized nations, higher education doesn’t require taking on a lifetime of debt. The power to cancel federal student debt already exists. What’s missing isn’t legal authority; it’s political will. And in the meantime, the student loan system continues to fail borrowers at every turn. The Trump administration’s efforts to roll back oversight and expand predatory, for-profit institutions is only deepening the crisis, putting millions more at risk.

This is why Debt Collective matters. A debtors’ union can provide solidarity, support, clarity and power. We have our eyes on the prize: full cancellation and fully funded public universities where no one is forced into debt for an education!

While we organize for these real solutions, we help each other survive the kafkaesque nightmare we’re currently in. Whether you’re trying to navigate programs like Public Service Loan Forgiveness, make sense of your repayment options, or simply find a space to share your story without shame, organizing with other debtors can change the equation. It reminds us that this isn’t an individual failure, it’s a structural one. And structures can be changed.

Please join us for our upcoming calls at debtcollective.org/events.

In the meantime, we’re happy to share some important, recent updates below.

We promise — although this post is longer than most— it is well worth the read. It is full of helpful and clarifying details. Take the information in strides. Spread the word. Stay informed.

Things will undoubtedly continue to shift but we encourage you to keep in mind: you’re not living beyond your means, you’ve been denied the means to live!

If you have Parent PLUS loans, get out now!

If you have Parent PLUS loans there is something you need to do right now.

Consolidate all of your Parent PLUS loans into a federal direct loan. You can do that here. Make sure you choose every single Parent PLUS loan that you have to consolidate them. Do it today, it only takes a few minutes. But no matter what, do it before the end of March.

Why? If you still have Parent PLUS loans after July 1 you will be trapped in higher monthly payments and excluded from cancellation thanks to Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” And because the Department of Education says it can take up to 90 days to process an application for consolidation, that means you need to start the process right now. If you wait, then the process is out of our hands, and if it isn’t completed by July 1 you are out of luck. Thanks Trump!

This is only for people with Parent PLUS loans. If you don’t have Parent PLUS loans Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” makes consolidation riskier depending on your situation.

Destroying Everything About Education Except the Debt

The Department of Education announced that they are moving federal student loans to the Treasury. You can read the inter-agency agreement here.

The plan has three phases.

Phase one: Treasury will assume responsibility for servicing defaulted student loans. The way things currently work is that once a student loan defaults, it gets transferred from your normal servicer to something called the Default Resolution Group which only services defaulted loans. If you thought dealing with Nelnet or MOHELA was hell, the Default Resolution Group is even worse, more impossible to reach or deal with, hold times and doom loops that are even worse. Is the plan to fix any of this? No. Are they going to get rid of the Default Resolution Group? No. They are just going to move its supervision to the Treasury.

Phase two: Treasury will take over non-defaulted loans “to the extent practicable” (spoiler alert: none of this is going to be practicable!)

Phase three: Treasury will take over the FAFSA as well as eligibility & enforcement of universities. They are saying the quiet part out loud here. Your school will be supervised by a bank.

There are many things to say about this but we’ll focus on just a few of them:

1. They are going to mess up your account during this transfer

Years ago the CFPB did a study of the errors that made to people’s accounts when 2.5 million were transferred between servicers one out of every five accounts had serious errors introduced. These were not minor errors. It included things like an incorrect payment balance, or missing payments. This happened when a mere 2.5 million accounts were transferred between servicers.

What Trump and McMahon are talking about is transferring over 40 million between government agencies! The errors are going to be much, much worse.

Just this month the Government Accountability Office released a report detailing how many accounts already have gross errors in them, and nobody is auditing them to try to catch and fix these errors. It’s hard to stress just how devastating these errors can be to someone’s financial life. You can spend decades of your life repaying a loan and the government can just… lose all record of these payments and put them back on your balance. Or they can just get your balance wrong in the first place. Or your monthly payment amount is wrong. A transfer of all 40+ million student loan accounts to the Treasury is going to create many more errors.

This is why we are recommending the one practical step people can take is to get their student loan documents to document these errors when they happen. Contact your member of Congress’s website and open up a “case file” with their constituent services office. Do it ASAP.

Here is a very detailed guide on how to do that. They are going to mess up your account. Let’s shut down Congress by forcing every office to un-mess-up your account.

2. Linda McMahon and Trump own the default crisis

There is a tension between Linda McMahon and Trump right now. McMahon wants to restart the brutal debt collection machine and take as much money out of student debtors pockets as possible. Trump’s political instincts understand that this is bad for him. Here’s why: “affordability” is an empty buzzword to most politicians, but they are all pretending to care about it and Trump understands that being the debt collector in chief is bad for him.

There was also a debate as to where to move federal student loans. Trump had previously floated the idea of moving it to the Small Business Administration (SBA), the agency that discharged hundreds of billions of dollars of PPP loans to businesses during the early stages of COVID.

But Linda McMahon (who was the head of the SBA during Trump’s first term) opposed that idea and fought for moving loans to the Treasury instead. It looks like Trump is losing his battles with McMahon. Including the battle of “affordability.” McMahon’s brutal debt collection agenda is winning. McMahon understands that debt is a form of social control. They want to ruin your life.

The real story of “Phase One” of this plan is that we have never seen so many people default on their student loans as we are right now. They are defaulting because people simply do not have the money to pay, and the government is hiking these payments.

See that red line! McMahon and Trump did that!

There is nothing ‘gradual’ about “Phase One.” Defaulted loans make up a massive chunk of the overall student loan portfolio, and it is growing at a rapid pace. They are starting with one of the largest segments of student debt, one of the most difficult to administer, targeting the most vulnerable people who literally don’t have the money to make a payment even if they wanted to.

Treasury has zero experience administering actual loans to people

This deep dive from Protect Borrowers from last year is worth revisiting.

One of the most hilarious phrases in the inter-agency agreement is “to the extent practicable.” None of this is going to be “practicable.” None of this is going to work. The Treasury is about to learn that student debt cannot be made to work no matter how hard they try.

Meanwhile, Democrats are defending a status quo that everyone hates without offering the bold solutions that people are demanding.

Under Biden, the Democrats were cautious and cowardly about acting within the law to cancel student loans. When the people finally forced them to act, they sabotaged the effort by doing it in a half-hearted way that unnecessarily gave the right wing courts a chance to kill cancellation. They didn’t have to do that. An administration that actually wanted to cancel student debt and was willing to be bold within the law could have done so swiftly, without giving the Republican Supreme Court justices a chance to stop them.

You almost have to admire Linda McMahon. Fortune favors the bold, and she is boldly ignoring the law to shut down the Department of Education and the Democrats aren’t lifting a finger to stop her.

The responses from the Democrats mirror their response to the war in Iran. A combination of “but this is illegal!” and “Trump needs to answer questions about how they are going to implement this.” They can’t even muster a strongly worded letter, just statements like this one.

You also have to admire the way that McMahon has trapped the Democrats into defending an indefeasibly cruel status quo. Are the Democrats going to insist that it is very important that the Department of Education is the agency that runs the brutal debt collection machine destroying working class families?

Policy experts underestimate just how much people hate the Department of Education because the Department of Education is the agency that is there to steal every extra dollar you make if you are lucky enough to make a few extra dollars. While the Department of Education is being dismantled it’s no secret that 40+ million Americans aren’t eager to save the agency responsible for acting like a predatory lender..

We do need a Department of Education, but one that actually invests in and supports education. We have never actually had a Department of Education like that, instead we’ve had a department of debt collection.

There are real solutions to our problems. Full cancellation and College For All. Fortune favors the bold, and it is time for us to organize to win these solutions. We are holding a political education series on College For All as a part of our Jubilee School. Register now.

What is going on with the SAVE plan?

If you want to actually understand what is happening, cancel your New York Times subscription and subscribe to the American Prospect. This week David Dayen has a report about the latest developments with the SAVE plan.

We used to be a free country, right?

The latest Academic Freedom Index has just been published. What is shocking is just how quickly American universities shifted from places where you could more or less have the freedom to think and research, to places where you must self-censor even when you haven’t been officially censored by administrators, which is also happening! In some universities it’s not possible to teach Plato. Wouldn’t want to corrupt the youth.

But the other thing worth noting is that although the US fall has been dramatic, it is part of a worldwide trend. The whole world is becoming less free.

Trump’s project to re-segregate America hurts everyone

The Century Foundation has a new report about how the changes to student loans in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” will mean fewer students can afford to go attend HBCU medical schools. This doesn’t just mean fewer Black doctors. One thing the Century Foundation report highlights is the way that HBCU medical schools prioritize the public good in ways that other medical schools do not. It means fewer rural doctors. It means fewer primary care doctors. As an aging boomer generation needs more doctors, they just won’t be there. For those who do attend HBCU medical schools it will mean more private loans, which are already racist-ly designed to offer higher interest rates and fewer approvals to Black students. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” introduces multiple factors that all reinforce each other.

The Department of Education is behind on its homework

Have you been waiting for the Department of Education to process your application for a new payment plan or Public Service Loan Forgiveness? You are not alone! The Department is behind on its homework to the tune of 576,000 applications. That is going to get much MUCH worse if over seven million people in the SAVE forbearance are expected to switch payment plans at some point.

Freedom to think or a place to live?

We all deserve to reach our full potential, to take time to study and figure out who we are, what we care about, what we are curious about. And we deserve a safe place to live. In America all of our basic needs are weaponized against us to force us into debt.

Fortune reports that many parents would rather help their kids pay a downpayment on a house than go to college. Of course only parents with means can do either.

“Twenty-nine percent of parents think helping their kid buy a home is more important than helping them pay for college, and more than half (55%) say it’s a toss-up for either one.”

As housing and education both become increasingly impossible to finance, people are picking and choosing between their basic needs. Which one would you rather do without? This is the richest country in the history of the world. Working class people deserve better.

If you haven’t yet found an organizing home, join Debt Collective, attend our upcoming calls, and organize with us.