The GOP War on Nurses
As they took control of both chambers of Congress and the White House in 2025, Republicans faced a dilemma. They wanted to extend the tax cuts enacted during Donald Trump’s first term, a central priority of both the president and the party’s corporate and donor base. But because the tax extensions would blow a multi-trillion-dollar hole in the ten-year deficit projection, they risked losing the votes of fiscal hawks inside their caucus.
So, Republicans went hunting for “pay-fors” to lessen the deficit damage. They axed tax credits for EVs and clean energy and decimated funding for Medicaid and SNAP. But in addition to these well-publicized cuts, they radically reduced federal student loan subsidies, including those for graduate students.
Of course, they didn’t say out loud that they were reducing support for graduate education to finance tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. Instead, they and conservative think tanks argued for the cuts on other grounds. First, invoking the so-called Bennett Hypothesis—named after the former Education Secretary, William J. Bennett, who articulated the theory—they claimed that federal student aid enables colleges to raise tuition, and that cutting federal funding will therefore force tuition prices down. Second, channeling arguments made by pronatalists at places like the Heritage Foundation, they said that young people, especially women, spend too long in graduate school, delaying marriage and childbearing, and that shrinking higher-education subsidies will boost the fertility rate.
These arguments point in opposite directions. The first claims that cutting federal loan support will make graduate education cheaper and therefore easier to earn, the other that those cuts will make grad school harder to pursue. Regardless, both converge on the same policy outcome: less federal money for graduate education, more for tax cuts.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which passed in July, reduces federal higher education spending by roughly $284 billion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, largely by tightening graduate student lending. It eliminates the Graduate PLUS program, which had allowed students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance for graduate degrees. Instead, the legislation limits future loan amounts based on the type of graduate program: $50,000 per year and $200,000 total for “professional” degrees, $20,500 per year and $100,000 total for all others.
To avoid a political fight about which degrees count as “professional,” lawmakers added a snippet of ambiguous language from an otherwise unrelated regulation. They directed the Department of Education to clarify the final definitions based on it. In November, a committee empaneled by the department released those definitions as a first step in writing the regulations that will implement the new law. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology, law, and clinical psychology were deemed “professional” and eligible for higher federal loan limits. Nursing, teaching, social work, physical therapy, physician assistant programs, and audiology were not.
Such regulatory notices usually fly under the public radar, but this one hit a nerve. Roughly four million nurses and more than two million social workers, including teachers and therapists, read the rule the same way: as a declaration that their work does not count as a profession. Their unions and trade associations protested. A prairie fire of anger and ridicule spread on social media. National media outlets covered the controversy. Even The Onion weighed in (“White House Reclassifies Nursing as a Hobby”).
Nurses already absorb endless abuse from hospital administrators and arrogant physicians while doing the unglamorous work of keeping patients alive. To then be downgraded—symbolically and financially—by the federal government was seen as a slap in the face.
“None of us anticipated the offense that would be taken by the term ‘professional,’” a member of the department’s rulemaking committee told me. In retrospect, however, it’s not hard to understand the anger. Nursing and social work are overwhelmingly female professions already facing shortages, burnout, and stagnant pay. Getting a raise in these fields often requires a master’s degree, and the Trump administration was putting up roadblocks. Nurses already absorb abuse from hospital administrators and arrogant physicians while doing the unglamorous work of keeping patients alive. To then be downgraded—symbolically and financially—by the federal government was seen as disrespect. “It’s just a smack in the face,” said Susan Pratt, a nurse who is also president of a union representing nurses in Toledo, Ohio. “During the pandemic, the nurses showed up, and this is the thanks we get,” she told the AP.
Public outrage has been so intense that, in December, a bipartisan group of lawmakers asked the Education Department to restore nursing to the list of professional degrees.
If the new federal graduate school loan regime is proving to be a disaster politically, it is not much better as policy. Robert Kelchen, a higher education policy professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville (and data editor of the Washington Monthly college rankings), notes that loan limits only make sense if they follow outcomes—either to prevent students from taking on unsustainable debt or to discourage enrollment in programs with poor repayment prospects. By those metrics, nursing stands out for the opposite reason. It has strong debt-to-earnings ratios, strict licensing requirements, sustained labor-market demand, and a clear social return. If taxpayers are going to subsidize any graduate profession, nursing is among the safest investments.
Lawmakers could have protected grad students and taxpayers from predatory programs by limiting graduate loans based on the average earnings of specific degrees. Instead, they rushed through a poorly worded piece of legislation that blew up on the launchpad.
Capping graduate degree loans at $20,500 annually might sound reasonable to conservative lawmakers trying to fill a self-created budget hole, but it makes less sense if you’re a working nurse or physical therapist entering an expensive, clinically intensive program in a high-cost area without family wealth. Pair that cap with the elimination of Grad PLUS and a tighter income-driven repayment regime, and the math will not work for many prospective nurses and teachers. Some will never apply. Others will turn to private loans. Many will walk away.
Of course, there are universities charging outrageously high tuition for certain graduate degrees that don’t lead to commensurately high incomes; some of those programs were created precisely to take advantage of unlimited federal graduate student loans. As the Washington Monthly reported in 2024, the worst offenders are often elite schools. For instance, Northwestern University offers a master’s in counseling that saddles average graduates with $153,657 in debt, who go on to earn only $56,897 on average annually five years later. (By comparison, many regional public universities offer the same degree at a fraction of the cost, and their graduates earn more.) Lawmakers could have protected grad students from such predatory programs—and taxpayers from picking up the tab when those students can’t repay the loans—by directing the Education Department to limit graduate loans based on the average earnings of specific degrees or programs. Instead, they rushed through poorly worded legislation that blew up on the launchpad.
The GOP’s pronatalist argument that reducing graduate education loan support will boost the birth rate isn’t looking so good, considering the damage likely to be done to the careers of those who deliver babies for a living.
Nor do their intellectual justifications hold up. The Bennett Hypothesis that higher federal student financial aid leads to higher tuition has been heavily studied, and evidence for it is mixed at best. Meanwhile, the pronatalist argument that reducing graduate education loan support will boost the birth rate isn’t looking so good, considering the damage likely to be done to the careers of many who deliver babies for a living.
In one respect, however, the GOP’s gutting support for graduate education has been a success: it helped deliver the votes for nearly $5 trillion in tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy (and massive federal deficits to boot). Tens of millions of nurses, teachers, social workers, and their families are likely to remember that in the midterms.
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