At the beginning of February, Daniel Leckie, 36, was living his best life. He was a new dad, a new homeowner and had his dream job as a historic preservation specialist for the General Services Administration. He was even a few payments away from having $80,000 in student loans forgiven after a decade of working as a public servant.
Then came the email. It said that Leckie would be among the thousands of trial and probationary staff across the federal government to be fired. He was just days away from being off probation and months away from loan forgiveness.
“I was so close,” Leckie said. “My performance review was great and yet I was crumpled up and thrown out like a piece of trash.”
The Trump administration’s purge of the federal workforce has left former federal workers like Leckie scrambling to find employment and facing the stark reality that the student loan forgiveness they’ve worked toward may now be out of reach. It’s unclear how many fired federal workers were working toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, but nearly 195,000 federal employees have filled out the employer certification form for the program, according to the latest available data from the Education Department.
Federal workers who were let go would have to get hired into another eligible position to continue their journey toward public service loan forgiveness.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness is a critical benefit that nonprofits, states and the federal government use to attract talent. Congress created the program in 2007 to entice college graduates to forgo jobs in the private sector for public service. To qualify, borrowers must make 120 on-time monthly student loan payments for 10 years while working for the government or certain nonprofits to get their remaining balance canceled.
The loan forgiveness program is notoriously complex and has been the subject of lawsuits, investigations, temporary fixes and a regulatory update to make it easier to navigate. Getting to the finish line is no small feat. And watching that line be pushed back or disappear altogether can be devastating.
After being laid off from her position as the student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in February, Julia Barnard wrote a blog post on her union’s website to help other fired federal workers navigate their student loans. Among her advice is for borrowers to download their payment data from StudentAid.gov and ask their agency’s human resources department to complete an employment certification to ensure they get credit toward loan forgiveness for their time in the federal government.
“I immediately felt that the question of what to do about [Public Service Loan Forgiveness] was going to be top of mind for many people,” Barnard said. “People plan their careers based on the promise of student loan forgiveness.”
She notes that many people working toward PSLF have been stuck in limbo because of the court injunction on the Saving on a Valuable Education Plan, known as Save. More than 8 million people are enrolled in the student loan repayment plan and have been placed in a form of forbearance that does not count toward the program. Barnard said many people hope to take advantage of a buyback program that lets people pay for months that didn’t count to get credit for the forbearance period.
Leckie, who is also enrolled in Save, was one of them.
Loan forgiveness was a perk, but not the reason Leckie went into public service. He became enthralled with historic sites after visiting Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill home in New York in elementary school. While earning a master’s in historic preservation from the University of Vermont, Leckie was intrigued by the GSA after learning more about it.
“I became sort of enamored with the General Services Administration, and I know that sounds ridiculous because it’s an agency,” Leckie said. “But it has stewardship over hundreds of historic federal buildings nationwide and is a leader in historic preservation. So [working there] was a dream and a goal for a long time.”
Before achieving that goal, Leckie worked in other government roles, first with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and then for five years with California’s transportation agency, Caltrans. By the time he packed up his life on the West Coast to head to D.C. in 2024, Leckie was a little more than a year and a half away from qualifying for loan forgiveness as a public servant. A part of him now wonders whether he should have stayed at his state job in California.
“I want to say I have no regrets because I chased the dream, but if I didn’t put it all on the line to move to D.C. and stayed in my job in California, I would be eligible for forgiveness by the summer,” Leckie said.
For now, Leckie’s biggest concern is finding employment to cover the next mortgage payment and help care for his 6-month-old son. He is optimistic that he will find work but expects it will be easier to get hired in the private sector, where firms tend to move faster than government agencies do.
That would mean giving up the benefit of loan forgiveness, a frustrating trade-off. He has no idea how long it will take to pay off his debt, a mix of undergrad and graduate school loans.
“I’m a proud public servant, and I think that the work we do is incredibly valuable. But I would be lying if I said that part of the reason I felt compelled to stay in public service for this long wasn’t because of the promise of loan forgiveness,” Leckie said. “It’s not my number one priority, but it’s still very dismaying.”
