Trump Cuts Put Entire Student Loan System at Risk

Education Department staffers warn that Trump’s mass firings will do irreparable harm to the student loan system. At least 300 people were fired last week from Federal Student Aid, the office within the department that manages student loans. 

This was shortly followed by President Trump’s Thursday executive order to eliminate the Education Department entirely. 

“They got rid of all of the quality checkers. It’s only a matter of time [before] they cause the whole system to fail,” a high ranking department staffer told The Guardian anonymously. “If this was a bank, and they fired all the quality assurance team, their regulator would have shut them down.… It’s the opposite of safety.”

These anonymous workers believe the purge will create opportunities for fraud and abuse and  lead to more bureaucratic issues, like long wait times for loan service providers. “As an organization, we were already doing a lot more work than our staffing provides. We would need 10 times more people for a bank of our size,” the senior staffer said.

“What Linda McMahon has done is given 5,000 institutions the green light to cause massive amounts of taxpayer fraud and abuse of federal financial aid dollars financed by taxpayers without any check and balances in place,” one fired employee said. “The gatekeepers are gone.”

This is a massive blow to an already hobbled system. Many of those fired were working full time to make sure that American citizens could pay for college without drowning in millions of dollars in debt.

The MAGA movement is not falling in line behind Elon Musk.

Republican strategists and voters with an affinity for Donald Trump are not keen to see the world’s richest man make cuts to agencies and programs that they rely on, sparking concerns that Musk’s entrenchment in Trump’s agenda could cost conservatives in midterm elections.

GOP strategist Alex Conant told The Hill Friday that there’ll be “political costs” to empowering Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency if Republican voters don’t hear about the “benefits” of DOGE—and soon.

“What Republicans should be concerned about is Musk’s effectiveness,” Conant said. “If DOGE actually breaks things that people care about and rely on, there’s gonna be political costs to that.”

Republican strategist Doug Heye predicted that Musk’s involvement in the White House would result in “real job losses” in the coming weeks and months.

“And where that has an impact, especially in specific communities … that makes their life harder for the reliable voter, typically, for Trump,” Heye told The Hill. “That kind of slow burn, I think, could have an impact.”

Even some of Trump’s biggest fans have had their immense loyalty challenged by Trump’s new billionaire adviser.

Trump attended an NCAA men’s Division I wrestling championship in Philadelphia on Saturday, alongside White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and Musk. But reactions to the Tesla CEO were less than warm, reported The New York Times.

Katy Travis, a 48-year-old wrestling mom from Montana, told the publication that Musk’s constant presence at Trump’s side “looks ridiculous,” and that his enormous influence over Trump made the president “look weak.”

“It makes him look like he’s kissing ass to get money,” Travis told the Times.

Others were worried about their investments as Musk’s aggressive slashes to federal agencies rattled the stock market.

“I know there’s a lot of concern about what he’s doing, as far as the DOGE stuff and all,” Jarrod Scandle, a 44-year-old retired Pennsylvanian police officer who specified that he’s more of a “Chevy or Ford” guy, told the Times. “I understand everybody’s concern. I’m concerned. I own stock, and you know, it’s red every day, and I’m worried.

Donald Trump has escalated his attacks on judges ruling against his administration, suggesting that they could be charged with sedition and treason.

The president reposted an article from Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website known for trafficking in hoaxes and conspiracy theories, on his Truth Social account Sunday. The article attempts to make a legal argument that federal judges who rule against Trump’s policies and executive orders can be prosecuted for sedition and treason.

The article makes wild claims about federal law concerning treason and seditious conspiracy, claiming that judges collaborating “with foreign or domestic entities to undermine national security-related executive decisions” would justify treason charges, while judges “intentionally obstruct[ing] executive functions and conspir[ing] to weaken presidential authority” could constitute seditious conspiracy.

Going even further, the article’s writer, Yaacov Apelbaum, argued that if judges’ rulings are “severely undermining the federal government’s operations,” that could constitute “aiding enemies or direct rebellion” under Article 3 of the Constitution.

If the president is giving serious weight to these legal theories, that goes far beyond his previous threats to impeach judges he doesn’t like, which has been echoed by Elon Musk and other right-wing figures and drawn a mealy-mouthed condemnation from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

It also suggests that Trump will stop at nothing to continue issuing legally questionable executive orders, which have decimated federal agencies created and regulated by Congress, and rushed through mass deportations and immigration penalties that very likely violate federal law and the Constitution. If Trump finds a way to sideline, impeach, or charge federal judges when they rule against him, he will have decimated the constitutional separation of powers and cemented himself as a dictator.

The judicial system has handed DOGE another loss.

Judge Deborah Boardman on Monday ruled that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has no legal right to the personal information of American citizens held at the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Treasury Department.

“No matter how important or urgent the President’s DOGE agenda may be, federal agencies must execute it in accordance with the law. That likely did not happen in this case,” Boardman wrote. She then filed a preliminary injunction blocking the aforementioned departments from sharing sensitive information with DOGE.

Boardman also referred to the Privacy Act of 1974 after noting that DOGE had already gotten its hands on systems containing Americans’ banking information, Social Security numbers, and marital and citizenship status.

“Congress’s concern back then was that ‘every detail of our personal lives can be assembled instantly for use by a single bureaucrat or institution’ and that ‘a bureaucrat in Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles can use his organization’s computer facilities to assemble a complete dossier of all known information about an individual,’ Boardman wrote. Those concerns are just as salient today.”

This story has been updated.

Activist groups are holding “empty chair” town halls in Republican districts to show how abandoned some red-state voters are feeling four months into Trump’s second term.

A dozen town halls over the last week have featured angry voters yelling at a picture of their no-show Republican lawmaker. Hundreds railed against Andy Harris in Maryland on Saturday, where Representative Jamie Raskin stepped up in his absence.

“What’s interesting is that the people who are showing up are not paid protesters, but the people who are not showing up are paid politicians,” Raskin said while organizers showed a giant “MISSING” milk carton ad with Harris’s face on it. “If your name is on the ballot, your face should not be on the milk carton.”

Senator Thom Tillis was attacked in South Carolina on Friday.

“We need [Senator Tillis] to know that a lot of bills that are going through that he’s voting for us, the people, a lot of us are against,” said town hall attendee Rebekah Burks. “And we want him to know that we are unhappy with that. He works for us. We’re his constituents. He works for us. We have the right to talk to him, and he should answer our questions.”

“Will you stand up for your people and Congress by taking food out of the mouths of hungry constituents in your district?” a constituent said to the empty chair New York Representative Elise Stefanik should have been in. “She promoted higher education and Pell grants, and today she’s calling for the destruction of the Department of Education, which administers those grants,” said another.

In Ohio, a whopping 1,400 people showed up to rebuke Senators Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted on Saturday.

“As an ex–federal employee and a union member, I’m mad as hell,” attendee Arnold Scott said. “How about these billionaires pay their taxes? When they cut employees at the various agencies, actually what they’re doing is cutting the services that the taxpayers are paying for. When they cut the VA, they’re cutting veterans. You stand there and say you support the veterans, but then you cut the veterans. When you cut them, that translates into it taking longer for them to receive the services that they’re entitled to.”

More of the same happened in San Diego, where voters’ main concern was “what Elon Musk and DOGE is doing as far as having an unelected person just dismantling the government.”

These town halls, organized by progressive group Indivisible, come as Trump and Musk’s current and proposed purges to Social Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration, and much more have started to hit their own constituents where it hurts—with no resistance from their representatives.