Day: November 4, 2025

• A former Trump student-loan official is leading a lawsuit against the administration’s debt collection efforts.
• The lawsuit accused Trump and credit reporting bureaus of unfair credit reporting.
• It comes after Trump resumed collections on defaulted student loans in May after a five-year pause.

A former Trump official is taking legal action against the administration over its treatment of student-loan borrowers who miss payments.

At the end of October, A. Wayne Johnson — who oversaw the federal student-loan portfolio during President Donald Trump’s first term — launched a class action lawsuit with Georgia-based law firm Cooper, Barton, & Cooper, against the Department of Education and credit reporting firms Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four borrowers who said they were falsely recorded as having defaulted on their loans and struggled to receive help from the department, and others similarly affected.

It accused the department and the credit reporting firms of “willful violations” of the Fair Credit Reporting Act that have “forced millions of borrowers into reported serious delinquency and even wrongful default, destroyed their financial futures, and extracted billions of dollars” from borrowers by marking them as delinquent without providing sufficient aid to enroll them in repayment plans.

Specifically, the lawsuit said that a decline in servicer capacity, mass layoffs at the department, and a lack of proper funding have contributed to a wave of improper defaults. Johnson said in a video that the relief the class action seeks includes $100,000 returned to each member and the removal of all negative credit reporting from borrowers’ credit reports.

An Education Department spokesperson said the lawsuit is “an embittered attempt by ideologues” to change the way the administration collects student loans. An Equifax spokesperson said the company does not comment on pending litigation, and Experian and TransUnion did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

In May, the department resumed collections on defaulted student loans after a five-year pause. Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary, wrote in an April opinion piece that the collections restart wasn’t intended to “be unkind to student borrowers.”

“Borrowing money and failing to pay it back isn’t a victimless offense,” McMahon said. “Debt doesn’t go away; it gets transferred to others.”

About 5 million borrowers are in default, and the New York Federal Reserve’s quarterly report on household debt and credit found that 10.2% of student borrowing was in serious delinquency in the second quarter of 2025, putting borrowers a step closer toward defaulting and facing wage garnishment or other penalties. Default typically happens after 270 days of missed payments.

Borrowers who were declared as seriously delinquent or in default since January 1, 2025, and are interested in joining the class action lawsuit can submit their information here.

• Paramount and its new owners, Larry and David Ellison, have worked to win Donald Trump’s favor.
• Donald Trump likes that, and says so out loud.
• But Paramount has also made deals to keep high-profile Trump critics on board: First “South Park,” and now Jon Stewart.

After Paramount announced it was canceling Stephen Colbert’s show last summer, his friend Jon Stewart responded with an “f-bomb-filled monologue” aimed at the company and the Trump administration. Stewart, like many others, believed Paramount pulled the plug on Colbert, a frequent Trump critic, for political reasons.

So it would be weird for Stewart, who is also a committed Trump critic, to stay on with Paramount after that. Right?

Nope: Stewart has re-signed with Paramount, and will continue hosting “The Daily Show” for the company through the end of 2026.

Which is another reminder that while the “David and Larry Ellison are tilting Paramount to the right to please Donald Trump” narrative has elements of truth to it, it’s not necessarily the entire truth.

As I’ve noted before, Paramount has made multiple moves in the last year that seem designed to please Trump — or, in some cases, were made explicitly to please Trump and his administration. Some of them were made under the Ellisons’ ownership, and some were made as previous owner Shari Redstone was finalizing a deal to sell the company to the Ellisons.

Among them: Paying Trump $16 million to settle what should have been a spurious lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview; agreeing to dispense with DEI initiatives; hiring an ombudsman with conservative credentials to oversee complaints about supposed bias at CBS News; and acquiring Bari Weiss’ Free Press and installing Weiss as editor in chief at CBS News.

And Donald Trump has definitely noticed those efforts. He has repeatedly praised the Ellisons and their ownership, including during a recent interview with … “60 Minutes“.

The Ellisons, meanwhile, are counting on Trump’s blessing if they move forward with plans to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. “We have a good relationship with the administration,” David Ellison noted last month.

On the other hand! Before Ellison formally took over Paramount, he agreed to a $1.5 billion deal to lock down “South Park” — a show that has gone out of its way to mock Trump this year. Now he has re-signed another super high-profile Trump opponent.

And while many people, including Colbert himself, believe he’s a victim of political appeasement, we’ve yet to see anything beyond circumstantial evidence for that argument. Paramount itself has said it canceled the show for financial reasons, which seems at the very least plausible, given the decline of late-night TV.

There’s also the fact that Colbert is still on the air, and will remain there through next spring. So he’s not exactly being silenced.

Which brings us back to Stewart. If Paramount really were purging its Trump critics, it wouldn’t be signing him to another contract.

So yes: The Ellisons clearly want Trump’s approval. But they also want an audience. Which means they’ll pay Trump $16 million one month and Jon Stewart the next — and keep hoping they can satisfy both.