From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, March 21st.

You've been hearing the news of the Trump executive order to begin dismantling the U.S. Department of Education.

It would take an act of Congress to

abolish it officially, but Trump and his education secretary, Linda McMahon, are downsizing to the

extent that they say is allowed by law that involves telling half the staff to stop doing their

work and much more. And it has many potential implications for American students at

various levels. We will focus primarily now on the implications for people with student loans with

Annie Nova, CNBC personal finance reporter focusing on education who's been reporting on this. Annie,

thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC. Thanks for having me.

You quote consumer advocates who say this couldn't come at a worse time for student borrowers.

Why is that? Yeah, exactly. So to take a step back for a minute, President Joe Biden forgave

more student debt than any other president in history. And yet, believe it or not, outstanding federal education loans still grew while he was in office.

So Americans owe more today on student debt than they did four years ago,

despite that historic forgiveness.

And that's because each year, millions of students have to take on more loans to go to college.

And Americans are really struggling with this debt. Some recent

data showed some where around 9 million people are behind on their student loans. A number of

promises that the Biden administration had made were unfortunately not able to reach borrowers

because of court decisions and a number of legal challenges.

So he'd promised to forgive up to $20,000 for millions of borrowers and the Supreme Court

ultimately struck that down.

In the meantime, borrowers had their payments on hold during the pandemic.

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