SNA (Tokyo) — In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders famously stated, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” The comment sparked an ongoing debate as to whether or not the party has a mere messaging problem or has indeed abandoned millions of Americans.

Concurrent with this discussion is a reevaluation of President Joe Biden’s efforts to cancel student loan debt. Writing for The Nation, Debt Collective’s Astra Taylor touches on failed attempts for broad-scale cancellation asserting, “Democrats like to blame the Supreme Court for their broken promises and the fact that these loans still weigh heavy on millions of households. In truth, Biden’s team deserves significant blame”—and points to how the administration chose a slow bureaucratic process that bought conservatives more time to establish legal challenges over the option to order immediate cancellation.

Then there’s the matter of Democrats boasting that Biden cancelled US$175 billion for 5 million people, a figure that, Taylor observes, “99% of this cancellation, however welcome, was already required by law.”

Throughout Biden’s term, Democrats Abroad posted a number of webinars on YouTube to, purportedly, assist borrowers. The lengthy videos, led by volunteer Rebecca Lammers, are riddled with gaffes and questionable financial advice. In one video Biden is credited for pausing federal loan repayments, due to the pandemic, in March 2020. Fun fact: He wasn’t in office yet! One more fun fact, the webinars doubled as an online venue to Get Out The Vote and collect donations.

More concerning is the questionable financial advice. In light of Taylor’s contention that many borrowers “are measurably worse off” than before the Biden administration took office, it is worth both examining Lammers’ problematic advice posted to Democrats Abroad YouTube channel and questioning how does this political organization plan to move forward, if at all, in this endeavor in the tumultuous reign of Trump and Musk.

Auto-Debit Payments

In the July 20, 2023, webinar Lammers encouraged borrowers to enroll for auto-debit payments without warning of servicers’ history of abusing this payment method. Servicers have reportedly overcharged, charged debtors multiple times in a month, and enrolled people into auto-debit without their consent and undercharging with the effect of having payments not count towards forgiveness plans.

The latter garnered reportage in 2021 when Army JAG Major Heather Tregle revealed in a 60 Minutes interview how she was enrolled in the ten-year Public Service Loan Forgiveness Plan and learned that nine years of monthly auto-debit payments did not count towards the forgiveness plan. Upon inquiring over the phone with the servicer she was told that auto-debit can take “one penny short of what is actually due so it doesn’t count.” This revelation highlighted the risks borrowers face when trusting servicers with automatic payments, a point Lammers entirely omitted in her advice to webinar attendees.

The subsequent webinar Democrats Abroad posted in January 2024 reiterated instructions to sign up for auto-debit with an added note that MOHELA incentivizes auto-debit by reducing interest by .25%. What Lammers did not mention was that MOHELA, the servicer that infamously played a central role in Biden v. Nebraska that blocked relief to 40 million student loan borrowers, had resurfaced in the media in August 2023, only weeks following her last webinar, for accusations of miscalculating borrower’s monthly payments.

On August 9, Newsweek quoted a Debt Collective post to X reading: “We are hearing a ton of reports that MOHELA is miscalculating people’s monthly student loan payment amount, sometimes forcing people to pay several thousand dollars more every month and giving them no way to fix the issue. If this happened to you reply below with your story” and followed up with X users who claimed to have received miscalculated payments. These reports painted a picture of a system failing borrowers, yet Democrats Abroad webinars continued to promote auto-debit without addressing these widely publicized pitfalls.

The webinars on the Democrats Abroad YouTube channel did not acknowledge the risks of auto-debit payments nor advise on precautionary measures or options to seek recourse should a borrower be financially harmed. One method to monitor the amount withdrawn is for borrowers to request their bank alert them whenever a debit occurs over a certain amount. In the event that the wrong amount is debited, requesting a refund from the servicer may result in prolonged delays.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Student Loan Ombudsman Julia Barnard told CNBC: “We’ve seen instances where borrowers have waited months or even years to receive a refund related to autopay errors.” Barnard recommended borrowers contact their financial institution within ten days to “quickly resolve errors in autopay amounts.” When errors occur borrowers have the ability to submit complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Student Aid Ombudsman. The CFPB is now being targeted by the Trump administration; the current halt on the bureau’s work has put a payout of US$100 million by the servicer Navient to borrowers who were allegedly illegally overcharged in limbo.

Defrauded borrowers may have to look to new avenues for recourse: unionizing with Debt Collective, contacting elected members of Congress, and taking to social media. In this current context, Democrats Abroad may face more pressure to not only issue warnings on the perils of auto-debit payments but to amplify the plight of borrowers overcharged by servicers. The organization’s silence on these practical steps leaves borrowers navigating a treacherous landscape without guidance from a group claiming to support them. The failure to adapt their advice in light of mounting evidence of servicer misconduct raises questions about their commitment to addressing the real-world challenges borrowers face daily.

Student Loans and Retirement

The Democrats Abroad webinars failed to warn of the adverse impacts student loans may have on retirees.

In a webinar Q&A session a participant anticipating having unpaid student debt in retirement asked Lammers: “Will the government garnish my Social Security income?” Lammers replied, “My understanding is that they don’t cross student loan debt with Social Security income, but don’t quote me on that” and assured them “most student loans will be written off after 20 or 25 years.”

Social Security income is, in fact, at risk. CNBC reported that a 2016 Government Accountability Office report found that “at least 114,000 beneficiaries had their Social Security checks garnished when they fell behind on student loan repayments.”

As to Lammers’ second point, those approaching retirement have reason to be skeptical that their debts will be cancelled on time as promised. According to the Center for American Progress, before Biden took office “only fifty borrowers out of an estimated 2 million who were eligible had had the remainder of their loans cancelled after paying off their student debt for more than twenty years, as is promised by income-driven repayment plans” (and only 7,000 public servants had seen their loans cancelled under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Plan). This stark statistic underscores the disconnect between promises made and relief delivered, a gap that Lammers’ assurances glossed over entirely.

Nearly a full year prior to this webinar, in August 2022, Debt Collective announced a campaign called “Fifty Over Fifty” to bring attention to the plight of aging borrowers. Fifty student debtors over the age of fifty planned to go on a debt strike to protest the resumption of repayments. In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, the “Fifty Over Fifty” initiative pleaded for Biden to use the Federal Claims Collection Standard Act to cancel the debt of elderly borrowers unlikely to pay off their debt and accumulated interest before death.

According to Lily Greenberg Call, writing in Truthout / In These Times, “Section 902.2 of the Federal Claims Collection Standard Act permits the Department of Education to discharge loans held by older borrowers, based on age and likelihood to pay the debt back within their lifetime.”

On December 11, 2024, older debtors assembled rocking chairs to protest outside of the Department of Education. The Biden administration did not deliver relief to elderly borrowers—a demographic rendered invisible in the Democrats Abroad webinars. The lack of attention to this vulnerable group in the webinars further illustrates a pattern of overlooking the specific needs of borrowers at different life stages.

Trump 2.0

Post-election Democrats Abroad have been silent on the student loan crisis. No webinars have been posted to YouTube after the election. In contrast, advocates and the media have been responding to the new dilemmas borrowers face.

Debt Collective sent a mass email to members on January 17 urging them to log into studentaid.gov and document (by screenshots or PDF prints) the number of Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) payments made that count towards cancellation. The organization questioned “whether Trump’s Dept of Ed will just delete everything to screw debtors” and stressed the importance of record-keeping especially as servicers tend to not track the number of payments.

In January, borrowers, for the first time ever, gained access to this pertinent information. Similar advice went public days prior when Forbes published an article on January 14 that noted: “it’s a good idea to retain records of your IDR loan forgiveness progress reflected in the tracker. While you may never need them, if something happens to your account, or features on the website subsequently change, it may be important to have a record of the information that is displayed.”

Changes are being made to the website. On February 25, Newsweek reported that IDR online applications were removed from the site. Borrowers may still use paper applications but have been warned to expect processing delays. As always, the future for debtors remains uncertain. In March, Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education and announced that federal student loans would be transferred to the Small Business Administration—a move that has triggered concerns that borrowers may be prone to privacy risks and see (more) errors on their accounts. Meanwhile, the work of the CFPB has been brought to a halt, which has prompted the Student Borrower Protection Center to create a tool for borrowers to open “student loan cases” directly with members of Congress.

Borrowers can stay informed by consulting with advocacy groups. The Student Borrower Protection Center posts pertinent news updates on its homepage. Individuals can also reach out to Debt Collective with questions on social media or by using the group’s website contact form. With Democrats Abroad offering no updated guidance in this shifting landscape, borrowers are left to rely on grassroots efforts and media reports to navigate the evolving crisis—a reality that underscores the organization’s apparent preference for maintaining the status quo over adapting to borrowers’ urgent needs.

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