From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, July 10.

Now we'll look at the student loan provisions in the Trump budget and policy law. These have gotten less attention than some other aspects,

like on Medicaid and the tax provisions and the national debt, but the new law also comes with a

major overhaul to how students and their families borrow money to fund higher education and how those

in debt repay their existing student loans. Joining me to explain and answer your questions is Ayelet Sheffey,

Senior Economic Policy Reporter at Business Insider.

Thanks for coming on.

Welcome to WNYC.

Of course, thanks so much for having me.

Let's start with the students who have not yet

taken out loans just yet, but are looking to finance a degree. Broadly, how has borrowing for student loans from the federal government changed in this new tax and spending law for people looking to borrow for next year or beyond?

Yeah, absolutely.

So this bill has a range of provisions here that will mean a lot of new repayment terms for new borrowers.

And the key thing here is the change to repayment plan.

So currently there are a range of existing income-driven repayment plans that borrowers can take on.

What this bill would do is really condense those plans into two main repayment plans.

One of those is a standard repayment plan, which is kind of a mortgage style.

You make payments over a fixed period of time set by your servicer based on your income.

And the other one is a new plan that this bill creates.

It's called the repayment assistance plan.

And this plan would basically set a borrower's monthly payment at 1% to 10% of their discretionary income.

It would waive unpaid interest that borrowers have on their balances,

...