The Student Loan Report the Trump Administration Didn’t Want Published
The Trump administration’s barely-alive Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published a heavily edited 20-page report on the state of student loans, after cutting nearly half of the original document.
The published report is 15 pages shorter than the original report, which was written by the CFPB’s former student loan ombudsman, Julia Barnard. Barnard’s report, which the Prospect is publishing below, included a discussion of the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy and its consequences for consumers. It also contained information on how colleges use personal data to determine the maximum tuition price that students and their families would be willing to pay.
The report, which is required by law, has come out every year since the CFPB was founded, and lays out the past year of the Bureau’s student loan actions and consumer assistance. The report is submitted to the secretary of the Treasury, the director of the CFPB, the secretary of education, and Congress.
CFPB’s whitewash of the report comes on the heels of repeated attempts to fire virtually the entire staff and defund the agency. After losing a legal case over the latter, CFPB Director Russ Vought did grudgingly seek more funds for the agency last week.
The bulk of the deleted content from Barnard’s report focuses on the struggles borrowers face and the private student loan companies that exacerbate them. Politico first reported on the discrepancy between the original report and the published one.
In an interview with the Prospect, Barnard said that the censored report is a symptom of two larger sicknesses in the government: the administration’s abandonment of student loan borrowers, and the gutting of agencies like the CFPB and the Department of Education.
“I genuinely think they are just throwing up their hands,” said Barnard, referring to leadership at the CFPB and DOE. “I don’t think they’re doing anything. They got rid of the oversight. I don’t think they’re intervening at all to help people.”
CFPB’s whitewash of the report comes on the heels of repeated attempts to fire virtually the entire staff and defund the agency.
Barnard, along with the majority of her colleagues at CFPB, was fired in the early days of Trump’s second term, as part of the administration’s effort to weaken the federal bureaucracy. She joined a court case, and a judge mandated that she be reinstated. She returned to the CFPB in April 2025, and was there until October, when she quit. (The mass firing order remains on hold pending a federal court case.)
When Barnard returned to work, she focused on doing as much as she could to help student loan borrowers.
“I should put my energy into doing a really good report and helping individual people,” she recalls thinking.
Her efforts were more necessary than ever. As she documented in the report, the country’s 40 million student loan borrowers are facing a shifting and more punitive environment under the Trump administration.
Student loan borrowers sent a record of nearly 25,000 complaints to the CFPB over the past year, Barnard notes in the report. Many of these complaints deal with mistakes made by lenders and servicers, which often force borrowers to pay more than they should, or even default on their loans.
Barnard wrote about the rising issue of defaults in her report, but that section was cut, along with a section on college pricing, and another on private student debt cancellation. In the section on defaults, Barnard outlined steps borrowers can take to get out of default, using language and graphics that are accessible to a layperson.
The college pricing section focuses on the role universities themselves play in the student loan crisis. The sticker price for college tuition has risen at more than double the rate of inflation since the year 2000. Most students don’t pay these rates, but what they actually pay is determined by third-party enrollment management companies, usually one of two dominant firms. These contractors for the colleges take in a student’s personal data—the median income in their ZIP code, or how often they’ve visited the college’s website—and use that to calculate the maximum tuition a student and family are likely to pay.
Schools then tailor their financial aid packages accordingly, with the goal of extracting as much cash from families as possible, forcing many to seek additional student loan support. Paradoxically, children of affluent families get higher discounts, because universities want to attract them for the purposes of asking the family for high-level donations. But for everyone else, the goal is to “systematically raise prices,” the report notes.
This kind of algorithmic, personalized pricing has been discussed before, including in a House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing last June. But the CFPB leadership purposefully buried it in this report.
In the third section that was cut, Barnard discussed how private student debt cancellation is often illegally denied to borrowers. According to the report, some private loan companies refuse to cancel debt even in cases where the Department of Education has determined that the borrower was defrauded by their college and is entitled to cancellation.
For some borrowers, the CFPB is their last recourse against illegal or simply negligent corporate behavior. “A lot of people are falling into default because of errors. Or people just couldn’t make a payment because they couldn’t get through to their servicer on the phone,” Barnard said. “Or they moved [during] the COVID [repayment] pause, so they never got the mail that said they owed payments again. Some of it is just truly negligence. And this is high-stakes negligence for people.”
Typically, to help borrowers who submit complaints, Barnard and her team would work with employees at the Department of Education, which maintains the data needed to solve student loan problems. But a newly instated ombudsman at the DOE told people not to work with Barnard and her team, she said. Eventually, he explicitly told one of Barnard’s colleagues that they should stop working on federal student loans.
Personnel at both DOE and CFPB had been cut, and she had few resources to help individual borrowers. “Of all the people I worked with, probably 15 individuals or something, there’s only one remaining.”
Later, a member of DOE leadership sent an email to Barnard telling her, in writing, to stop working on federal loans. According to Barnard, the email was also sent to representatives from the for-profit Maximus Federal Services, which runs the DOE’s default portfolio, on that email.
“Maximus and CFPB had nonpublic business that was highly contentious,” Barnard said. Maximus Federal Services is also the third-leading source of student loan–related complaints to the CFPB, according to a graphic, Figure 3, on page 11 of the uncensored report. That graphic is not included in the officially published report, and Maximus Federal Services is not mentioned anywhere in the report.
She also pointed to the DOE’s appointment of Nicholas Kent and James Bergeron as an example of potential corruption and conflict of interest. Kent serves as the undersecretary of education, and Bergeron is a deputy undersecretary. Both have previously worked as lobbyists. Bergeron served as president of the National Council of Higher Education Resources, a lobbying group for the private loan industry.
Sometimes, the problem is negligence rather than corruption. The published report points to Geof Gradler as CFPB’s new private education loan ombudsman. Gradler describes himself as a “former principal in lobbying boutique with consulting focused toward Financial Services industry clients” on LinkedIn. According to Barnard, Gradler holds three other senior positions at CFPB. His appointment is just one example of the Trump administration’s stated goal of reducing CFPB to “five men and a phone” in a single room.
Barnard details the struggles she faced to do her job in the report’s “Ombudsman’s Discussion,” which was also scrubbed from the document. In that section, she flags that some new Department of Education personnel are former lobbyists and executives from private loan corporations, and recommends that policymakers consider canceling student debt.
She also names the struggle she and the CFPB were weathering: “While this attack on the institutions put in place to protect borrowers continues, it is the people whose complaints and applications go unprocessed who will be left behind.”
She ends the discussion section, which is available below, with a direct message to student loan borrowers: “I also share in the frustration of the borrowers who submitted complaints through so many channels and who have not received a satisfactory response or resolution and probably will not for the foreseeable future. You deserve better.”
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