Constituent Request: Protect Student Loan Borrowers

I'm writing as a constituent and a federal student loan borrower who has never missed a payment or been in default, not once, in over two decades of repayment. I'm asking you to act now on the crisis the current repayment plan overhaul is creating for borrowers like me. My loans date to the mid-1990s, originally with a clear payoff schedule and a reasonable path to resolution. The shift away from SAVE and other income-driven plans, and the push toward the new Repayment Assistance Plan, is forcing millions of borrowers to choose a new plan under deadline pressure, with almost no guidance from servicers on what that choice actually costs us. This isn't just my experience: 70 percent of borrowers recently surveyed report feeling overwhelmed managing their loans, and nearly half report long wait times reaching their servicer for help. The consolidation requirement is what concerns me most. Consolidating doesn't just change a monthly payment. It pays off the original loan and issues a new one, and that new loan starts its forgiveness clock at zero. Years of qualifying payments, made in good faith under the terms I agreed to, simply stop counting. For borrowers with loans from the 1990s, this means decades of progress toward payoff or forgiveness can disappear because of a procedural requirement, not because we did anything wrong. This isn't a minor adjustment. It's a rewriting of the promissory notes borrowers signed in good faith, with no protection for the people who upheld their end of the deal. Complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about federal student loans hit an all-time high last year, and hundreds of thousands of income-driven repayment applications were already backlogged before this transition even began. Borrowers need real resources to understand these choices before deadlines force our hands, and those of us who kept every commitment need our progress protected, not erased. I'm asking you to push for preserved payment credit for borrowers who must consolidate, and for extended timelines with real servicer support during the switch. This needs attention now, not after more borrowers are harmed by a process most of us never asked for and can't navigate alone.