Project 2025 Targets Negotiated Rulemaking to Gut Student Loan Protections and Silence Public Voice
Project 2025 calls for eliminating negotiated rulemaking under the Higher Education Act, which would remove the primary mechanism for public participation in federal student loan and aid regulations, enabling wholesale deregulation of loan forgiveness, borrower protections, and accountability measures.
At the heart of Project 2025's Department of Education chapter is a quiet but devastating proposal: eliminate negotiated rulemaking from the Higher Education Act. This obscure procedural change would strip away the legal requirement that the Department of Education must convene stakeholders—students, borrowers, colleges, consumer advocates, state officials—before writing rules that govern federal student loans, Pell Grants, borrower defense to repayment, and Public Service Loan Forgiveness. The authors deride the process as a "three-ring circus," but what they really want is to remove the one formal check that prevents the Secretary of Education from writing regulations that serve private lenders and political donors rather than borrowers and taxpayers.
Without negotiated rulemaking, the Department could unilaterally rewrite loan repayment terms, eviscerate borrower defense claims, gut income-driven repayment, and fast-track a return to the pre-2009 bank-centered loan system—all without public hearings or input from the families and students who bear the consequences. The same chapter calls for ending what it calls "abuse" of borrower defense and PSLF, slashing loan forgiveness, and switching to fair-value accounting to make federal loans appear more costly on paper, which historically has been used to justify cutting aid. This is not merely a deregulatory wish list; it is the procedural skeleton key that unlocks every other anti-borrower policy in the document.
As of this writing, the administration has not yet formally proposed legislation to amend the HEA to eliminate negotiated rulemaking, nor has Congress introduced such a bill. The threat remains on paper, but the playbook is explicit: work with Congress to delete the requirement, or at minimum replace it with non-binding public hearings. The fight to preserve negotiated rulemaking is the fight to preserve democratic accountability in higher education policy. Without it, the next time the Department tries to strip away loan forgiveness, borrowers will have no seat at the table—and no legal basis to demand one.
The humanitarian alternative
Congress should reject the repeal of negotiated rulemaking and instead strengthen it with binding timelines and transparency requirements. At the same time, the administration should immediately halt new oil and gas leases on public lands, reinstate the Paris Agreement, and redirect subsidies to clean energy, with a just transition for workers and frontline communities.
Grounded in
- Project 2025: Department of Energy
- From Disavowal to Delivery: The Trump Administration's Rapid Implementation of Project 2025 on Public Lands
- Trump Executive Order on Energy
- Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
- Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data
- IPCC Sixth Assessment Report
- Bureau of Land Management Oil and Gas Leasing
- Environmental Justice and Public Lands
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 12: Department of Energy (pp 373-375)"— 340 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise published by October 1 if they are to be implemented by July 1st of the subsequent year) compounds the problem, making it unduly challenging to update regulations as needed to keep pace with changes in education, finance, accounting, pedagogy, and student assessment. In recent decades, negotiated rulemaking has become a veritable three-ring circus, replete with negotiators who use their Twitter accounts and other social media feeds during negotiations to denigrate the process and their peer negoti - ators in real time. A few Members of Congress use the public comment process to deliver political speeches, apparently to raise their own profiles but without adding any new information to the process. Some advocacy groups have latched onto the process for fundraising purposes, sometimes misrepresenting negotiation language to agitate followers and supporters and encourage them to make financial contributions. At times, the department itself has appeared to sabotage consensus, which enables them to write the regulation as they wish and without regard to the concerns raised by negotiators. l The Department of Educati…"