I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, October 7th.

It's not that often that the government admits a program launched with good intentions is not working well in real life. But that happened

yesterday and it may affect your student loan. Listen up if you're a teacher or a nurse or a first

responder or a military member or veteran or anyone else with a student loan working in what might

be called a public service profession or if you know someone who does.

The New York Times headline on this simply says,

Troubled Student Loan forgiveness program gets an overhaul.

And with us now is New York Times correspondent, Stacey Callie,

she's a consumer finance reporter who writes that the Biden administration is taking a chainsaw to the program's rules.

Thanks for coming on to explain this to us, Stacey.

You have a lot of people with student debt now sitting on the edge of their car seats or wherever they are.

Welcome to WNYC.

Thank you.

So what is this student loan forgiveness program and what are the jobs it applies to?

So it applies to a pretty giant swat of jobs. It covers anyone who's in nonprofit work or government

work. So that's about 25% of the American workforce. And this is a program that Congress created in

2007. And the deal at the time was you work in public service

for 10 years, you make 10 years of qualifying payments on your student loans, and in 10 years,

we'll forgive what's left. The idea was to lure people into public service recognizing that

they might take a lower paycheck to do it, so this was an incentive. The problem is that this

program has been just a complete

bureaucratic clogmire ever since. In the first couple of years, the people applying for

...