As Georgians prepared to honor fallen troops Monday on Memorial Day, the state’s Attorney General Chris Carr was joining a group of 51 Attorneys General in sending a letter and urging the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) to automatically forgive the student loans of veterans who became totally and permanently disabled in connection with their military service.
While an automatic discharge process is in development, the letter proposes, DOE should halt debt collection efforts targeting disabled veterans, and clear their credit reports of any negative reporting related to their student loans.
“Our veterans made a promise to us when they offered to serve our nation in the armed forces, and we as a nation must keep our promises to them, particularly to those who were injured in the line of duty,” said Carr. “Our veterans deserve nothing less, and I am proud to join my colleagues in advocating for this important change in the U.S. Department of Education’s student loan forgiveness policies.”
In their letter to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the Attorneys General point out that last year alone there were 42,000 veterans identified by the U.S. DOE as eligible for student loan relief due to a service-related total and permanent disability. Fewer than 9,000 of those veterans had applied to have their loans discharged by April 2018, however, and more than 25,000 had student loans in default.
Under federal law, DOE is required to discharge the federal student loans of veterans determined by the Department of Veterans Affairs to be unemployable (or totally and permanently disabled) due to a service-connected condition. Although DOE currently requires disabled veterans to take affirmative steps to apply for a loan discharge, those steps are not required by law.
The Attorneys’ General note that the federal government has taken some steps to make it easier for eligible veterans to secure student loan relief. According to their letter, however, an automatic discharge process that gives individual veterans an opportunity to opt out for personal reasons “would eliminate unnecessary paperwork burdens and ensure that all eligible disabled veterans can receive a discharge.”
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