Public Citizen just filed another lawsuit against the Trump regime.

We filed this suit on Tuesday, November 4, which was Donald Trump’s 289th day back in office. This is our 22nd lawsuit against his administration in that time. That’s one lawsuit every 13 days. And we’re not done yet.

This latest lawsuit is intended to prevent the administration from denying student loan forgiveness — for potentially thousands and thousands of borrowers — just because Trump and his henchmen don’t like the politics of some of the places these loan recipients work or the fact that the work they do helps everyday Americans.

Here’s more about the case:

• In 2007, Congress passed bipartisan legislation — which was then signed into law by President George W. Bush (a Republican, if memory serves) — to create the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program.

• The PSLF program was established to help people choose to go into, and stay in, public service work. It is meant to help many, many kinds of workers, including: public school teachers, first responders, social workers, military personnel, librarians, government workers, people who work at homeless shelters and food banks, nurses and other employees at nonprofit hospitals, people who provide services to survivors of domestic violence. The list goes on and on.

• This is no handout. To qualify, borrowers must work a full ten years in a full-time public service job (defined as most federal, state, and local government jobs and jobs with specific kinds of nonprofit organizations) and they have to make regular loan payments that entire time. Only then can they apply to have any remaining debt forgiven (and many borrowers have been improperly denied even after fulfilling the requirements).

• There have been problems with how the program has been run. But it is still an important way to encourage people to go into public service work, where pay can be less than what the private sector might offer.

• Rather than try to make the PSLF program run more smoothly and help more Americans, the Trump administration wants to essentially punish borrowers who work for government agencies or nonprofits the regime doesn’t like.

• Back in March — amid a flurry of cruel, senseless, or outright illegal executive orders — Trump directed the Education Department to deny loan forgiveness under the PSLF program to any borrowers who work for employers engaged in “substantial illegal activities.” That might sound reasonable, but only for as long as it takes to realize two things.

• One, deciding what “substantial illegal activities” means is exclusively up to lackeys Trump has installed at the Education Department — which, remember, is being run by the billionaire former professional wrestling magnate and MAGA extremist Linda McMahon.

• Two, the Trump regime has already made it very clear that it considers certain things — like helping immigrants, helping trans kids, valuing diversity, and organizing Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights to criticize or protest the regime — to be “illegal.”

• Public Citizen and co-counsel Student Defense are representing these plaintiffs in this case: Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights; the American Immigration Council; The Door — A Center of Alternatives, Inc.; the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).

As Public Citizen’s Cormac Early, lead attorney on the case, noted to the national media: “Congress created PSLF to support those who work in public service jobs, not to let the president play favorites. The Trump administration should not be allowed to use a program designed to reward public service as a weapon against its political enemies.”

MORE ABOUT TAKING THE TRUMP REGIME TO COURT

Public Citizen is doing everything we can — within our modest means — to fight what the Trump regime is doing to our country. It’s David and Goliath for sure, but we will never back down. Even where we haven’t (yet) notched definitive victories in court, we are slowing down the regime and making it work a lot harder in pursuit of its desire for absolute power.

This is the 22nd lawsuit we have filed (so far) against the administration since Trump returned to power. Are these lawsuits alone enough to fully defeat Trump and MAGA? Of course not. But are they a meaningful part of the pushback needed to collectively save our country? No doubt about it.

What you and Public Citizen are doing together matters. What hundreds of other organizations, big and small, are doing matters. What millions upon millions of our fellow Americans are doing matters. We believe that to our core. We take solace in that. And we draw inspiration from that. We hope you do, too.

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- Lisa Gilbert & Robert Weissman, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen
 
 
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