The Trump administration is preparing to crack down on student loan defaulters starting next year. This will be interesting because you can bet Democrats are going to flip out about this. The Education Department confirmed it will begin withholding wages from borrowers who fail to pay their debts.
The first wave hits in early January. About 1,000 individuals who defaulted on their student loans will see wage garnishments begin the week of Jan. 7, 2026.
“We expect the first notices to be sent to approximately 1,000 defaulted borrowers the week of January 7,” an Education Department spokesperson told The New York Post. “The notices will increase in scale on a month-to-month basis.”
The missives will give borrowers a 30-day heads-up about the plans to garnish wages.
The Department of Education is authorized to seize up to 15% of a borrower’s after-tax income until the defaulted student loans are paid off or some other remedy has been reached.
Wage garnishments for defaulted student loan debt had been on pause since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Under the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996, the Federal Student Aid agency is required to carry out collection activities for defaulted loans.
Borrowers are required by law to have been given sufficient notice on their defaulted loans before the seizures can begin.
Back in May, the Trump administration moved to restore long-standing enforcement tools that had been sidelined for years, including the seizure of Social Security benefits and tax refunds from borrowers who defaulted on their student loans. Wage garnishments, officials indicated, would also return after being suspended under Joe Biden.
There’s no doubt that Joe Biden exacerbated the mess that President Trump is now confronting. Approximately 5.3 million borrowers have gone nearly a year without making payments on about $117 billion in student loan debt, according to the latest available data as of June 30. Those staggering numbers exploded after the end of a 12-month “on-ramp” period that Biden’s Education Department used to delay the inevitable return to repayment following the pandemic pause.
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That pause began as a temporary emergency measure under President Trump in 2020, when the country was shut down in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden turned it into a political crutch. He repeatedly extended the moratorium to appease his liberal base and buy votes. Then he rolled out the so-called “fresh start” program, insulating defaulted borrowers from wage garnishment and the seizure of tax refunds and Social Security benefits. The result was predictable: mass delinquency, ballooning unpaid debt, and yet another Biden-era crisis handed off for someone else to clean up.
Biden also attempted to unilaterally forgive billions in student debt in a blatant attempt to bribe voters to vote Democrat. But his efforts were hampered by legal snags because a president doesn’t actually have the authority to cancel student debt.
“The Biden Administration misled borrowers: the executive branch does not have the constitutional authority to wipe debt away, nor do the loan balances simply disappear,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said.
Far-left Democrats like Sens. Bernie Sanders (S-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have spent years pushing student loan forgiveness as a political entitlement rather than a contractual obligation. Make no mistake about it, they will fight any return to accountability. But the wreckage Biden left behind makes one thing clear: this crisis was manufactured in Washington and driven by politics, not sound policy.
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