Roughly 90,000 public service workers are stuck waiting on student loan forgiveness they say they've already earned, and now a teachers union is taking the federal government to court over it. The American Federation of Teachers and nine individual borrowers filed a proposed nationwide class action against the Department of Education and Secretary Linda McMahon, accusing the agency of stalling a program meant to erase debt for people like nurses, social workers and public school teachers.
The lawsuit, Weingarten v. McMahon, was filed Friday in federal court in Washington, D.C., as Case No. 1:26-cv-03826, according to The College Investor. It targets the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which allows qualifying workers to have their remaining federal student loan balances wiped out after 120 qualifying monthly payments made while employed in public service, per the American Federation of Teachers. More than two million borrowers are pursuing forgiveness under the program, according to reporting by Forbes.
A Buyback Program Meant to Help, Now Backed Up
At the center of the complaint is PSLF Buyback, a mechanism that lets borrowers pay for certain past periods when they weren't making payments — such as during deferment or forbearance — and have those periods retroactively counted toward their 120-payment total. The AFT says the backlog of pending buyback applications swelled from 49,318 in April 2025 to 89,720 by March 2026, nearly doubling in less than a year, the union notes. The College Investor reported that figure climbed further still, reaching roughly 88,000 applications by April 30, 2026, with the agency disclosing that 18,000 to 19,000 of those were duplicate requests.
The pace of resolving those applications hasn't kept up. The Education Department decided an average of about 1,472 buyback requests per month between April 2025 and March 2026, Forbes reported, and the complaint estimates that clearing the backlog that existed by the end of April 2026 would take more than 18 months at that rate. A separate College Investor analysis of March 2026 data found an even longer timeline, estimating roughly 27 months to clear the backlog based on that month's processing rate, when the department decided 3,280 applications while receiving 4,660 new ones. Buyback applicants typically wait 12 to 24 months for their requests to be processed, and they receive no automatic forbearance pausing their loan payments and interest in the meantime, according to Forbes.
Borrowers Say Payments Vanished or Were Reversed
The lawsuit describes borrowers whose payment counts moved backward rather than forward. Elizabeth Schoepflin, a speech-language pathologist from New York and an AFT member named as a co-plaintiff, reached 120 qualifying payments in April 2026 — only to receive an August 4 notice stripping 14 months from her count, The College Investor reported. Another plaintiff, Carly Baetz, had already accumulated 118 qualifying payments on some loans by June 2026, but her payments from July through October never posted to her tracker, per the same account.
Forbes detailed a similar case involving a borrower named in the complaint who had 118 qualifying payments as of June 2026 and continued working in qualifying public-service employment and making qualifying payments while waiting for updates. According to Forbes, the Education Department did not post that borrower's July, August, September or October 2026 payments, and separately reversed some of her previously credited payments, cutting her total from 118 down to 116. The department reportedly stopped adding new payment periods to some borrowers' StudentAid.gov PSLF trackers beginning with the July 2026 payment period, Forbes reported.
Union Leader Points to a Growing Backlog
AFT president Randi Weingarten said McMahon left 90,000 public employees waiting while buyback applications piled up, according to Forbes. Laura C. Dismore, senior counsel at Protect Borrowers — one of the legal organizations representing the AFT in the case — said public service workers deserve the debt relief they were promised and that the union will pursue accountability in court, Forbes reported. The complaint alleges the department withheld recently earned qualifying payments without explanation and claws back previously granted credit, the AFT says. The plaintiffs are seeking permanent injunctive relief compelling the department to comply with its legal obligations to forgive loans for borrowers who meet PSLF's requirements, rather than monetary damages, and the suit seeks class action status on behalf of similarly situated borrowers nationwide.
The legal claims rest on the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment's due process clause, The College Investor reported. Those arguments track the statutory framework underlying PSLF itself: under 20 U.S.C. § 1087e, a borrower must be employed in public service both at the time of forgiveness and throughout the period in which each of the 120 required payments is made, after which the Secretary of Education is directed to cancel the remaining loan balance. Federal regulations describe the program's purpose as encouraging people to enter and remain in public-service careers by forgiving eligible Direct Loan balances once those payment and employment requirements are satisfied, according to 34 C.F.R. § 685.219.
The Department's Response
The Education Department has pushed back on the characterization of the delays. It said it was correcting coding errors made during the Biden administration that had caused inaccurate payment counts for some borrowers, according to CNBC, which quoted the department saying it remains committed to ensuring every qualifying payment is properly credited to a borrower's account. The department also told the Washington Post that the buyback process requires manual review of borrower records and that it is working with loan servicers to streamline the process going forward.
Not the First Fight Over PSLF
This isn't the AFT's first legal battle over forgiveness delays. A 2019 lawsuit the union brought against then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Weingarten v. DeVos, was settled in October 2021 and led to a PSLF reconsideration process, according to the AFT. A more recent case produced an October 2025 agreement requiring the department to keep processing buyback requests, The College Investor reported. Separately, a November 2025 lawsuit in Massachusetts challenged a final PSLF rule, arguing that it was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act and violated the First Amendment.
Student loan borrowers have faced mounting backlogs on multiple fronts this year. The department received 321,481 new income-driven repayment applications in March 2026 alone, up from 243,258 the previous month, Forbes reported. And just two days before the AFT filing, a separate class action was lodged against the department over alleged blocking of closed-school discharge program payouts, according to The College Investor's reporting on that case.
