BATON ROUGE, LA – Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry today
joined New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, Utah Attorney General Sean
Reyes, and 49 other Attorneys General in a bipartisan effort 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.
Last year, DOE identified more than 42,000 veterans as
eligible for student loan relief due to a service-related total and permanent
disability; however, fewer than 9,000 of those veterans had applied to have
their loans discharged by April 2018, and more than 25,000 had student loans in
default.
In a letter to DOE – General Landry and his colleagues call for
a process to automatically discharge the student loans of veterans determined
by the Department of Veterans Affairs to be eligible for such relief. While the
automatic discharge process is in development, the letter proposes that DOE
should halt debt collection efforts targeting disabled veterans, and clear
their credit reports of any negative reporting related to their student
loans.
“I am proud to join this bipartisan effort and urge the Department
of Education to take action to better protect those who once protected the Nation,”
said General Landry. “Our veterans deserve nothing less.”
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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A copy of the letter from the Attorneys General of
Louisiana, New Jersey, Utah, Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arkansas, California,
Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Guam,
Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland,
Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska,
Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Northern
Mariana Islands, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South
Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming may be found at may be found in the More Resources box on top right of this page.
