Payback federal student loans or else starts Monday. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. First,

the jobs report is in and while it was better than low expectations, hiring in the month just ended was less than in March.

Still 177,000 more people were on payrolls in April. The unemployment rate holds steady at a quite low 4.2%.

Christopher Lowe, chief economist at FHN Financial, joins us now. Given the whiplash of trade policy and cuts to the federal workforce, the report is not bad, Chris?

Yeah, I think that's about right. It's not good either, though. And I think it is important to note that there's a few things that have been percolating this year continued in April. People clearly frozen in terms of hiring and probably in terms of expansion as well while they're trying to figure out the economic

environment. And then, of course, government hiring, while it's not as weak as you might expect

given federal layoffs, those layoffs are evident to some extent as well.

What does this mean for the people who have to decide on interest rates next week?

Yeah. I tell you, the market reaction was interesting. Market interest rates rose. And the logic there

is that for the Fed, which is worried both about an economic slowdown and a pickup in inflation because of the tariffs, this sort of tips the

balance in favor of worrying about inflation. So the market expects that's the emphasis the Fed will

put on next week. All right. We shall see. Christopher Lowe at FHN Financial, Chief Economist there. Thank you. Thank you, David.

The U.S. Department of Education will resume action against student loan borrowers who are in default.

Collections start this Monday. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzor joins us now.

A little background here first, David. We're only talking about federal student loans, that is,

loans funded by the federal government, not private loans. The first Trump administration paused

federal student loan payments at the start of the pandemic. President Joe Biden extended those

pauses repeatedly, but most borrowers were required to restart payments again in 2023. The Education

Department says, though, more than 5 million borrowers are now in default. That is, they haven't

made a monthly payment in over 360 days. Now, the government says it hasn't collected on those

loans since the first March of the pandemic. But what changes exactly three days from now?

The Treasury Department will start withholding money from government payments like tax refunds and starting early this summer from Social Security payments.

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