The Trump administration is doubling down on its efforts to close the federal Education Department as a preliminary executive order prepared for President Donald Trump, seeking to eliminate the agency to “the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law,” could be signed by the president as soon as Thursday.

The order echoes a public letter sent to employees Monday from newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, aiming to dismantle the agency she oversees.

The letter, published Monday on the department’s website, reads that a “historic final mission” to “transfer educational oversight to the states” is the next phase.

Those moves will “profoundly impact staff, budgets and agency operations here at the Department in coming months,” McMahon wrote, signaling layoffs and cuts.

When it comes to higher education and federal loans, McMahon’s letter said little, other than about holding colleges more accountable and having them become more affordable. “A post-secondary education should be path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs,” her letter said, echoing a bipartisan priority to balance spiraling college costs with income results.

What happens to student loans if the Education Department closes?

Should student borrowers with federal loans be afraid of losing aid they have already been granted?

No, and they should not be afraid of terms and conditions of those loans changing, either, said Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a Massachusetts-based organization that provides free loan advice nationally to 12,000 students annually.

Some say Trump’s push could have dire consequences for students in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Though state and local governments already control most of what happens in the classroom, the U.S. Department of Education plays a limited but vital role, some advocates say. The agency manages college loans for nearly 2 million Pennsylvanians, seeks to protect students from discrimination and provides more than $1.6 billion annually to the commonwealth’s schools, much of that directed to the communities most in need.

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“The proposed dismantling of the department of education would be disastrous for Pennsylvania students, particularly those who are most marginalized by our education system,” said Maura McInerney, legal director for the Pennsylvania-based Education Law Center.

Rachel Langan with the conservative-leaning Commonwealth Foundation said most concerns about abolishing the education agency seem unfounded, especially in Pennsylvania, which she said would handle most tasks better than the federal government.

“Pennsylvania is going to take care of kids in Pennsylvania,” said Langan, the foundation’s senior education policy analyst. “So I don’t think that we here have a lot to fear from what happens at the U.S. Department of Education.”

For those who have qualified for federal aid calculated through the FAFSA form, or have received a Pell grant, loans are not on the chopping block, Mayotte said. Any changes would come only if Congress approves them and votes to approve a spending bill still being negotiated that won’t be created until April or May.

May is when college admissions for the class of 2025 will start rolling in, setting off budgeting decisions for families.

McMahon’s letter came on the heels of Education Department workers’ being placed on administrative leave, and an email offering others the option of $25,000 buyouts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Trump’ proposed executive order strives to do away with any parts of the Education Department not protected by law, news reports have said. The department was created by an act of Congress in 1979, and completely shutting it down would require congressional approval. If this takes place, student loans would likely be transferred to the Department of the Treasury, experts say.

“Even if the loans were to move to a different agency, the terms and conditions would not change. This would not get rid of Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs (PSLF), for example. It would not change or privatize interest rates,” Mayotte said. That’s because those sorts of changes would not pass legal muster, she said.

“The terms of these loans are written into statute. Congress has never retroactively changed or removed a benefit from an existing loan, and even in this Congress, I don’t see them doing that now … I just don’t think student loans are high on their priority list, I think it’s K-12, civil rights and DEI,” Mayotte said.

“Despite everything that’s been going on last week, I actually don’t think the current administration is going to make a lot of changes within the student loan programs,” Mayotte said. “I do think we may see some significant changes for future borrowers due to some proposals out there that could restrict ability for parents or graduate students to borrow,” she said, noting that it’s still “way too early to say this is definitely going to happen.”

Will Parent PLUS, Grad PLUS loans be eliminated?

House Republicans are floating proposals that might eliminate or restrict the Parent PLUS or Grad PLUS loan programs. PLUS loans pay for education costs not covered by student aid programs and depend on regular credit checks; these loans were nationalized during the Obama administration.

The Senate would still have to get on board with these proposals in a budgetary approval process called reconciliation — a move typically used by the party with the majority in the Senate to bypass the 60-vote requirement to approve bills. That process could go on until May, when the two houses come to an agreement on a spending bill.

“It’s still very early in the reconciliation process,” Mayotte said.

One group that could benefit from privatizing Parent and Grad PLUS loans is middle-class borrowers with good credit, said Jack Wallace, director of government affairs at the private student loan refinancing firm Yrefy. Private loans for people with good credit could be cheaper than existing federal loans, and would reduce the burden on the government, he said.

“If borrowers have very good credit, they’re better off doing a private loan, because right now private loans are 3% to 5% cheaper than a federal loan,” Wallace said.

Critics of Trump’s imminent takedown of the Education Department say that moving its student loan arm to another agency would mean losing the institutional knowledge and expert insights of career civil servants who have administered these loans for years.

“There are around $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loans with more than 40 million customers. If you measure that against the assets of U.S. banks, it would make the Education Department the country’s fourth- or fifth-largest bank. Putting this in Treasury, it would seem to me, would be the right way to go,” Wallace said.

That description of the Education Department is “a red herring,” said Mayotte. “If the Education Department was eliminated tomorrow, the loans would not go away, they would only be sent to a different agency. The department doesn’t own the loans, the federal government and the U.S. taxpayer do,” she said.

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Higher education’s cost is a real problem

Republicans opposed Biden-era loan forgiveness as wasteful — reducing “waste” is a war cry at DOGE, reflected in McMahon’s letter calling to rid the Education Department of “bureaucratic bloat.” Biden programs, however, were “targeted,” Mayotte said. “Biden loan forgiveness was crafted especially around borrowers that struggle the most,” she said. They were not looking to forgive loans of students that just graduated, “but for people that have been paying for decades and whose income did not appear to support the ability to repay the loan.”

The real problem facing administrations, including Trump’s, is lowering the astronomical costs of higher education, Mayotte said.

The federal government has generally failed to check those costs.

Student loan debt is a “symptom” of the larger problem of the high cost of college, Mayotte said. If the Trump administration succeeds in addressing the high cost of college, then losing access to loans for parents and graduate students might not be as painful, she said. There are many proposals in Congress to lower college costs. “At a 10,000-foot level, I can say that both sides of the aisle agree that colleges need to have some skin in the game. That is coming, whether now or some years down the line,” she said.

States have to start reinvesting in higher education, Mayotte said. Once states begin to reinvest, the median cost of public colleges will come down. That could in turn affect costs at private colleges, she said.

Bethany Rodgers of USAT and Tom Haines of phillyburbs.com contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Who handles your student loan if federal Education Department closes?