I sued the Education Department

This one’s for you if something is wrong on your federal loans and nobody will fix it. You’ve called the servicer, filed the ombudsman complaint, maybe called your congressman’s office, and you’re still stuck.

If your loans are private, or you just don’t like your payment, this one won’t help much. Skip it.

There’s a law that lets you ask a federal judge to make the Department of Education do its job. I’d never used it before. I just filed one of these for a client.

Most of you will never need it. Most problems do get fixed by the servicer or the ombudsman, slowly and annoyingly. This is for the ones that don’t.

What happened

I’ll call my client Ruth. That isn’t her name.

Ruth spent her whole career in public schools. She’s going for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and the Department says she’s a few payments short of 120.

We think the number is wrong. Years ago she was paying every month, and her bank statements match the servicer’s own payment history. The Department has those years coded as forbearance anyway.

She only needs a few of those months to count.

She disputed it years ago, while she was still working. The Department wrote back that it would review the old records. As far as we can tell, nobody ever did.

She tried everything before she hired us. Then I tried everything. Ombudsman complaints, letters to MOHELA’s advocate office, her members of Congress, a request for her records under federal privacy law. We got pieces back. We never got a decision.

So I sued the Department in federal court. The filing fee was $405. The government gets 60 days to answer once it’s served, so now we wait.

What kind of lawsuit this is

It’s called an APA claim, for the Administrative Procedure Act. That’s the law that lets you take a federal agency to court when it won’t do something it’s required to do, or when it makes a decision that ignores its own rules.

You sue the Department, not the servicer. You’re not asking for money. You’re asking a judge to order the Department to act, like fixing a count or deciding an application it’s been sitting on.

I want to be honest about why I filed it. I don’t know if we’ll win, and winning isn’t really what I’m after.

What I want is the information. Once there’s a lawsuit, a government lawyer has to pull her file and look at it, and somebody has to explain her count in writing. If that gets her count fixed without a judge ever ruling, I’ll take it.

I didn’t know how to do this until recently, so I asked for help. I reached out to the National Consumer Law Center to get their read, and they pointed me to Adam Pulver at Public Citizen, who sues federal agencies on behalf of consumers. I sent him my draft, got on the phone with him, and rewrote it more times than I’d like to admit.

Who this might fit

It fits when you’ve already earned something and the Department won’t give it to you. Your count is wrong and you can prove it, or your application has sat for a year with no answer, and the complaints went nowhere.

It doesn’t fit when the problem is a rule you don’t like. If Congress changed the law, there’s nothing for a judge to order the Department to do.

It also doesn’t fit if you’re still years from forgiveness. In a big PSLF case a few years ago, the court threw out the borrowers who were one to seven years from 120, because the harm hadn’t happened to them yet.

And I wouldn’t try it on your own. People have filed these themselves and been thrown out for picking the wrong court or the wrong kind of claim.

What I’d do now

If you’re stuck, start building your file now, even if you never sue anybody. Keep every letter. Write down every case number the ombudsman gives you. Download your payment history from studentaid.gov.

Ruth’s case only works because she kept bank statements from more than 15 years ago. Most people don’t have those. If you do, don’t throw them out.

We have a longer guide on what to do when your servicer won’t fix the problem, starting with the dispute letter and going up from there.

If you want to see what one of these looks like, here’s a sample complaint I built from Ruth’s, with a made-up borrower and made-up facts (PDF). It’s not something to file as is. If you end up working with a lawyer on something like this, it might save them some time.

I don’t know how hers ends. What she wants is to stop thinking about these loans after a whole career in public schools, and I’m going to keep pushing until she can.

— Stanley

P.S. Mostly I’ve been feeling thankful lately. I really like doing this job.

Some of you have noticed the changes. We started sending things through a secure portal instead of email attachments. The emails look different. We built calculators. And we recently switched the articles to a dark background, because some of them are long and the extra contrast makes them easier to read.

We also keep the articles up to date, which is more work than it sounds, because the rules keep moving. I want ours to be the best place on the internet to read about student loans.

We’re doing all of that with one attorney and six assistants. Will Guidara, who ran Eleven Madison Park, has a name for what we’re going for. He calls it unreasonable hospitality. I can’t explain how dope it feels to be working toward that every day.

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