(Daily Signal)—The Department of Education under President Joe Biden loosened requirements for a student loan program specifically for public servants and nonprofit employees a few months after unions that stood to benefit from the change sent a letter to then-Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
The watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, which obtained the letter via a Freedom of Information Act request, faulted the unions for self-dealing when they demanded the Biden administration cancel the student loan debt of all public sector and nonprofit workers who completed 10 or more years of service, leaving taxpayers to pay off the balances. The revelation comes as the Department of Education under President Donald Trump is revising the program to root out alleged abuses.
The unions defended their move as keeping in line with the goal of the legislation that created the loan program. Either way, the letter arguably demonstrates unions’ large degree of influence in the Biden administration.
“These unions were lobbying for a direct financial benefit for their members at the expense of the American public,” Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday.
“By adopting the position the unions advocated for in this letter and loosening the restrictions on the PSLF [Public Service Loan Forgiveness program], which it appears they eventually did, the Biden administration’s Department of Education transferred the loan balances of millions of members of these unions to taxpayers,” he added. “This was an utterly self-serving request couched in the language of altruism and fairness.”
“When the big school unions created the U.S. Department of Education, it wasn’t because they didn’t expect something in return,” Betsy DeVos, who led the department in Trump’s first term, told The Daily Signal. “The payoffs will continue until the department is closed.”
The National Education Association; the American Federation of Government Employees; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the Service Employees International Union; the union representing employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and others signed the letter on April 1, 2021.
“The undersigned unions, representing more than 10 million public service workers, urge you to take immediate action to cancel the student loan debt of all public sector workers who have completed a decade or more of service,” the letter stated.
The letter cited the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, which established a program to cancel remaining student loans for certain workers—government employees; members of the military; those in public health; and those who work for nonprofits under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code—who had been paying their loans for 10 years.
The letter claimed the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program should have covered more government and nonprofit employees and claimed that DeVos had mismanaged it. Between 2017, when the first public service workers became eligible for the program, and 2021, only 5,500 borrowers had their loans erased.
In October 2021, during the Biden administration, Cardona relaxed the rules for program, moving more than 550,000 borrowers closer to forgiveness, The Associated Press reported.
Trump signed an executive order in March, accusing the previous administration of abusing the loan forgiveness program “to pay off loans for employees still years away from the statutorily required number of payments.” He also claimed the department “misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest but actually harm our national security and American values.”
Finally, he claimed the program “creates perverse incentives that can increase the cost of tuition, can load students in low-need majors with unsustainable debt, and may push students into organizations that hide under the umbrella of a nonprofit designation and degrade our national interest.”
Trump then directed the program to exclude nonprofit organizations that he claimed break the law by promoting violations of federal immigration law, supporting terrorism, backing experimental medical interventions on children in the name of “gender-affirming care,” aiding and abetting illegal discrimination, and more.
On Monday, the Department of Education announced its intent to establish a rulemaking committee to prepare regulations for federal student aid programs, including the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. It is asking the public to nominate negotiators for the process.
“President Trump’s executive order will restore the PSLF program to its statutory basis and not allow PSLF to fund anti-American activists,” a department spokeswoman told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “The executive order is narrow in its purpose to ensure certain nonprofits do not inappropriately qualify for PSLF but does not direct other changes to the program. The department is reviewing the executive order and will ensure the program is managed effectively for those it is intended to serve.”
Supporters of the relaxed rules claim that erasing student debt helps promote education and assists the less fortunate. Critics argue that “forgiving” student loans props up bloated left-leaning universities while taking money from taxpayers to subsidize those fortunate enough to go to college.
One of the unions that sent the letter defended its request to Cardona as being in line with the law’s original purpose.
“Congress passed and President [George W.] Bush signed into law Public Service Loan Forgiveness with the explicit purpose of encouraging Americans to enter careers in public service, including in the federal government,” a representative for union representing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau told The Daily Signal. “There is no hidden agenda.”
Hidden or not, the unions’ letter confirms the basic premise of my book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.” My book traces how a system of left-leaning nonprofits—including many of the unions that signed the letter—sent staff and ideas into the Biden administration, shaping federal policy in a direction critics would describe as “woke.”
Cardona did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.
The National Education Association; the American Federation of Government Employees; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; and the Service Employees International Union did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.