Two things to note on this: 1) the Obama policy (not even official administrative rule with any weight of enforcement, just a memo with a veiled threat of nega

Two things to note on this: 1) the Obama policy (not even official administrative rule with any weight of enforcement, just a memo with a veiled threat of negative attention if flouted with any frequency) was only in place for his last 1.5 years. This letter just pulls that back to the first 6.5 years of his reign. 2) Note this quote: "The withdrawal of the Obama administration memo arrives the same week as a report from the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) showing that millions of people had not made a payment on $137 billion in federal student loans for at least nine months in 2016, a 14 percent increase in defaults from a year earlier. " In other words, after this rule was put in place, millions of loan recipients stopped making any payment altogether and 14% more entered default despite added mechanisms for avoiding default. This article doesn't even go into the huge taxpayer bailout of students of closed and failing for-profit diploma mills[0]. It was an unprecedented windfall for those affected, the entire debt was forgiven, they took no hit on their credit, and the debt forgiveness wasn't counted as income by the IRS (like debt forgiveness normally works). Taxpayers paid for it all. It was a great buy-off of new voters. An obvious small mitigation would have been to instead have their debt applied against a replacement degree program (e.g. you owe $20,000, you go to a new school at $10,000 tuition per year, then your first two years' tuition payments wipe out that debt, with interest charges stopped while in school). [0] https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/student-loan-ranger/2015/12/09/pursue-a-federal-student-loan-discharge-as-a-victim-of-college-fraud https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/student-loan-ranger/2... [EDIT]: Here is the original Obama FFEL memo: https://ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN1513.pdf https://ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN1513.pdf