From today’s New York Times:
More than 170,000 federal student loan borrowers who said they were defrauded by their schools are set to have $11 billion in debt erased, after an appellate court sided with the borrowers and rejected a request from the Education Department for more time to review their claims.
The decision is the latest grant of mass relief in a class-action suit that was originally filed during President Trump’s first term. The suit centered on federal loans taken out by students who attended dozens of predatory for-profit schools. The government settled the case in 2022, under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and forgave the student loan debts of nearly 300,000 borrowers who had become plaintiffs in the class action.
But the settlement required the government to keep reviewing fraud claims from borrowers who filed after the 2022 deal was announced. The agreement set a deadline of early 2026: If the Education Department had not adjudicated the additional claims by then, they were to be automatically approved.
In late 2025, the Trump administration asked for an additional 18 months to review the cases. A federal district judge rejected the request, and last month, a panel of three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit unanimously upheld his decision.
The total size of the class-action settlement has now expanded to nearly 500,000 borrowers, who will have debts totaling $23 billion wiped out.
That makes it — by a substantial margin — the largest class-action settlement in American history, according to the Project on Predatory Student Lending, the nonprofit group that represented the borrowers. It is also, by their calculation, the largest financial settlement against the federal government.
Read the complete story here.