The Brief

If you're a federal student loan borrower or about to become one, your head may be spinning.

On July 4, when President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, he also greenlit a history-making overhaul of the federal student loan system — one that will affect the lives of many, if not most, of the United States' nearly 43 million student loan borrowers.

And boy is it a lot to unpack, with new, tighter borrowing limits and dramatically reduced repayment options, to name just a few of the sweeping changes.

In May, we explained this overhaul, as conceived by House Republicans. Now that a Senate compromise has been signed into law, here's an updated guided tour of the final changes.

Let's start with the elephant in the room:

President Biden's SAVE plan is ending

The most generous repayment plan is the Biden-era Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan. But it is so generous, with its low monthly payments and expedited loan forgiveness, that Republicans have so far successfully argued in court that it is too generous. In fact, the nearly 7.7 million borrowers currently enrolled in SAVE have been in legal limbo for months, without interest accruing or required monthly payments.

That's about to change.

"For all practical purposes, I would say SAVE is just kind of dead at this point, even if it's technically on life support," said Preston Cooper at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

This month, the U.S. Education Department announced that on Aug. 1, SAVE borrowers will, once again, see their balances grow — with interest. Because the SAVE plan is still enjoined, though, borrowers won't yet be required to make payments. Still, Cooper said that many borrowers, rather than watch their loans balloon, will likely want to move to a different plan.

Roxanne Garza, director of higher education policy at the liberal-leaning EdTrust, worries that the relatively last-minute announcement about interest accrual will cause problems for the Education Department, which saw roughly half its staff cut by the Trump administration.

"I think what will likely happen now is you will see a rush of people trying to take action that will, again, likely create an even bigger backlog," said Garza.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, borrowers in SAVE will have to change plans by July 1, 2028, when SAVE will be officially shut down. If they wait, though they currently can't be required to make payments, they will see their loans explode with interest.

But the two new plans that the law creates won't be ready for a year, and the department's own website, meant to help borrowers navigate their repayment options, does not reflect this confusing new landscape, except for a banner that says: "Loan Simulator will be updated at a later date to reflect recent legislative changes."

Beginning July 1, 2026, new loans will be subject to new borrowing limits

Undergraduates won't see any changes to their loan limits. But it's a very different story for graduate students and parents.

For graduate students, new limits will make it harder for lower- and middle-income borrowers to attend pricier graduate programs. The current grad PLUS loan allows students to borrow up to the cost of their graduate program, but Republicans are shutting it down this time next year.

After that, grad students' borrowing will be capped at $20,500 a year with a lifetime graduate school loan limit of $100,000, a big drop from the previous cap of $138,500.

How big a deal will this be? AEI's Cooper has been crunching the numbers and said, "Just under 20% of master's students borrow above the proposed limits."

Borrowers working toward a professional graduate degree (i.e., medical or law school) will have their borrowing capped at $50,000 a year and their lifetime cap increased from $138,500 to $200,000.

Parents and caregivers who use parent PLUS loans to help students pay for college will also see new loan limits. They will be capped at $20,000 a year and, in aggregate, at $65,000 per child.

Cooper says only one-third of parent PLUS borrowers with dependent children currently take out more than this new annual loan cap.

The law also sets a new lifetime limit, for undergrad and graduate loans combined, at $257,500 per person.

Repayment options for borrowers are changing dramatically

Republicans are reducing repayment options for new borrowers from the current seven plans down to two new plans. The new plans are:

1. The standard plan

New borrowers will be assigned a repayment window of between 10 and 25 years, depending on the size of their debt, with equal monthly payments like a home mortgage.

Under this plan, borrowers with larger debts would qualify for a longer repayment period:

• Owe less than $25,000, and repay over 10 years.
• Owe $25,000 or more but less than $50,000? Repayment expands to 15 years.
• Owe $50,000 or more but less than $100,000: Repay over 20 years.
• Anyone owing $100,000 or more would repay over a 25-year period. 

2. The Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) 

For borrowers worried they don't earn enough to cover the inflexible monthly payments of the new standard plan, Republicans have also created the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP).

On RAP, payments would largely be based on borrowers' total adjusted gross income (AGI).

• Borrowers earning no more than $10,000 would be asked to pay $10 a month. 
• Earn more than $10,000 but not more than $20,000, and your payment will be based on 1% of AGI. 
• More than $20,000 but not more than $30,000, it would be 2% of AGI and so on up the income scale.
• Repayment tops out at 10% of AGI for borrowers earning $100,000 a year or more.

Current borrowers will also have access to this new RAP plan, as well as to some older plans.

RAP is the latest in a long line of income-based repayment plans. How does it compare with previous plans?

Monthly payments for many middle-income borrowers on RAP will be lower compared with earlier plans, according to multiple experts. But RAP is not as generous as the Biden-era SAVE plan, which, again, is being phased out.

RAP will require even the lowest-income borrowers to make a minimum monthly payment of $10, ending the $0 option of previous plans and making it more expensive for these borrowers.

This new $10 minimum payment wouldn't make a big difference to the government's coffers, said Jason Delisle, who spoke to NPR in May, when he was studying student loan policy at the Urban Institute. Delisle has since been appointed to a position in the Trump administration.

Delisle said the purpose of RAP's new $10 minimum payment likely stems from "emerging research that requiring people to make some payment each month is good because it keeps them connected to the loan and makes it less likely that they'll default."

But some borrower advocates worry that this new minimum payment could have the opposite effect.

For the lowest-income borrowers, asking for $120 a year is "significant," EdTrust's Garza told NPR in May. "I think having that be a required minimum payment will likely push more borrowers into default."

But RAP also comes with a few new perks that borrowers will likely appreciate.

RAP will waive any interest that is left after a borrower makes their monthly payment. 

If their monthly payment is $50 but they owe $75 a month in interest, the government will waive the remaining $25.

The result: Borrowers will no longer see their loans grow, which was a common downside to previous income-driven repayment plans.

Borrowers on RAP will also see their balances go down every month.

The government will pitch in up to $50 to make sure lower-income borrowers see their principal balances shrink.

For example, a borrower whose monthly payment makes only a $30 dent in their principal would see the government knocking off an extra $20 a month.

Borrowers whose monthly payments already reduce their principal balance by at least $50 would get no extra help from the government.

"It's a form of monthly loan forgiveness," Delisle said. "It's a drip, drip, drip of loan forgiveness, rather than waiting for the big payout at the end of 20 years."

The loan forgiveness math will change.

While previous plans offered forgiveness after 20 or 25 years, the RAP would extend that to 360 qualifying payments, or 30 years. That's a big difference, said AEI's Cooper.

Borrowers with typical levels of debt "and typical incomes for their degree level are almost always gonna pay off well before they hit that 30-year mark," Cooper said. "So if you're going into RAP, I wouldn't be thinking about forgiveness because you're probably gonna pay it off before you hit 30 years."

In short, the days of what Delisle called "the big payout" are over.

But wait! Current borrowers have another loan forgiveness option (sort of).

In addition to RAP, an older plan known as Income-Based Repayment (IBR) will still be available to borrowers who take out their loans before July 1, 2026.

Part of the reason IBR remains is that, unlike other income-driven repayment plans, IBR wasn't created by the Education Department. It was created by Congress and is codified in statute.

How does IBR work? For borrowers with loans older than July 2014, their payments are capped at 15% of discretionary income. Payments on younger loans are capped at 10%.

With the Biden-era SAVE plan being wound down, Delisle said, most lower- and middle-income borrowers would likely have lower monthly payments on the new RAP compared with IBR.

But, Delisle said, borrowers with older loans might still want to enroll in IBR if they've been in repayment for close to 20 or 25 years, so they can qualify for loan forgiveness.

That's because, on IBR, pre-2014 loans qualify for forgiveness after 25 years. For newer loans, it's just 20 years — both considerably shorter than RAP's 30-year schedule.

One big caveat to all this: The Education Department has temporarily stopped processing all loan forgiveness for borrowers on IBR because of the legal actions surrounding the SAVE plan, according to a statement from Education Department Deputy Press Secretary Ellen Keast.

Keast said the Biden-era rule explaining SAVE "provided the authority to count forbearances in IBR toward loan forgiveness" and, because that rule has been frozen by the courts, the department can't accurately determine loan forgiveness under IBR. "Discharges will resume as soon as the Department is able to establish the correct payment count," Keast said.

The department told NPR that any borrowers who make payments after they're eligible for forgiveness will eventually get a refund.

Edited by Nicole Cohen
Copyright 2025 NPR

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene became a household name in the run up to the 2020 election for divisive rhetoric, political stunts and enthusiastic support of President Donald Trump. But after growing disagreements with Trump during his second term, Greene announced she will leave Congress in January before her term is up.

Greene said it would not be fair to her northwest Georgia district, one of the most conservative in the country, to have them "endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for" while noting that "Republicans will likely lose the midterms."

Greene's split with Trump widened in recent weeks as she pushed for the release of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

For months, Greene had been publicly pressing Trump and top Republicans in Congress to release all files from two federal investigations into Epstein. She was part of a small cadre of Republicans who helped force a vote on the House floor to release the files — a process that drove Trump to reverse his position on the documents and led to near-unanimous support for the measure this week.

But before Trump reversed course, he lashed out last week, calling her "Marjorie Traitor Greene," and told reporters, "Something happened to her over the last period of a month or two where she changed politically."

In her post Friday night, Greene defended her decision to fight for the release of those documents.

"Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for," Greene wrote.

Greene's defiant push against Trump

On a brisk morning this week, Greene stood outside the Capitol with some of the women who say they were abused by Epstein.

"I've never owed him anything," Greene of the president on Tuesday. "But I fought for him and for America First. And he called me a traitor for standing with these women."

The cracks between Trump and Greene grew over the last year, as Greene increasingly pointed out where she saw the president falling short: she called the war in Gaza a genocide, criticized Trump's decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, and pressed for expiring health subsidies to be extended, citing the threat of skyrocketing premiums for people in her district, including her own children.

And she was doing it not just on social media or right-wing outlets, but on programs like ABC's The View.

"What Happened to Marjorie?"

"I was thinking, if this was the first time I'd ever seen this person, it sounds like a normal congressperson from Schoolhouse Rock," said University of North Georgia professor Nathan Price after Greene's appearance on the daytime television staple.

For some, this new persona may be hard to square with the Greene many Americans first got to know: the congresswoman who embraced QAnon conspiracy theories, liked a post that called for violence against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. and heckled school shooting survivor David Hogg in 2020, before he became a prominent political activist.

Even Trump has publicly mused in recent weeks: "What happened to Marjorie?"

Georgia Republican strategist Brian Robinson says it's a fair question.

"I am open to the idea that she's had a 'road to Damascus' moment, a conversion, that she sees the errors of the toxicity and wants something that's better," Robinson said in an interview with NPR earlier in the week.

On her own social media and with journalists, Greene has been open about addressing claims from Trump and others that she has changed or abandoned the president. NPR reached out to Greene for further comment.

"Nothing has changed about me," Greene told the hosts of The View. "I'm staying absolutely 100% true to the people who voted for me, and true to my district."

Robinson said the changes could be part of a natural evolution for Greene, a former CrossFit gym owner from the Atlanta suburbs.

"We love to elect outsiders to Congress," Robinson said. "They go to Congress with very little idea of how it works. And if at some point you're like, 'I want to do substantive things that make America better, then I've got to do this a little bit different."

Or, Robinson said, she may be trying to broaden her appeal with an important constituency as she weighs a bid for higher office. Trump said last week he showed Greene polling earlier this year suggesting she would flounder in a race for Georgia governor or Senate.

"Is she intentionally signaling to women, 'The good old boys club ignores us, and I understand your struggles?" Robinson said.

Both Robinson and Price said Greene's evolution was more about style than substance. She has disavowed some of her more controversial views, but not others, like the unproven assertion that widespread fraud upended the 2020 election result.

The anti-interventionist, anti-elite principles that first propelled her to Congress also remain core to her identity. "What she's responding to is believing that the President has shifted on these issues," said Price.

Some potential political opponents see an opportunity in Greene's break with Trump. Robinson, who worked for Greene's opponent in her first primary race, says in the past he has warned potential challengers not to underestimate her.

"You are wasting your time," Robinson said. "She will beat you. And I would have said that into infinity until this week."

How Greene's district reacted to the shift

But in the 14th Congressional District, it was not clear this week that anything had changed. As chair of the Paulding County Republican Party, Ricky Hess spends a lot of time talking with voters.

"The issues that they want to talk about involve high property taxes, high health care costs, whether or not their kids will be able to buy a house when they graduate," Hess said this week ahead of Greene's resignation.

Hess told NPR he believes Greene's "America First" worldview resonates in this heavily working class and rural stretch of Northwest Georgia.

"She's pretty tapped into what her constituents are wanting, and I have to believe that most of her actions are in service to that," Hess said.

Hess said voters saw Trump and Greene as fighters on the same team. Though Martha Zoller, who hosts a political talk radio show that airs across North Georgia, said in an interview Wednesday she didn't believe everyone's minds were made up.

"People are kind of reeling, if you want to know the truth," Zoller said. "We haven't had a lot of listeners discussing it because they're waiting to see what happens."

Georgia political observers noted that Greene has been anything but a predictable politician — including her surprise resignation.

Trump has come to a truce with other politicians he's feuded with, including Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. And his future relationship with Greene could still evolve.

But Zoller said the conflict between Trump and Greene has been about more than just two big personalities falling out on the national stage.

"I think that the big discussion we're going to be having as Republicans over the next few years is what is the Republican movement once it's not Trump?"

Zoller said earlier this week it seemed clear that Greene wants to be part of that discussion. But with her resignation, the answer to that question is may be less clear now than before.

NPR's Stephen Fowler contributed to this report.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Promoting illegal car sideshows and street races in Long Beach, whether through social media, print, or group chats, could soon cost you up to $1,000 and six months in jail.

The Long Beach City Council on Tuesday voted to create a new ordinance that makes it illegal to encourage or advertise street takeovers, saying these exhibitions are an outstanding danger to the public and a nuisance to neighborhoods.

The item will come back to the dais as a draft prepared by the city’s attorney’s office, which would then be voted into law.

It will allow police to levy penalties on those they can prove promoted or encouraged people to attend the illegal exhibition, which often includes cars doing donuts and burnouts in public intersections ringed by crowds. Police will track promoters through testimony and social media. Promotion bans like this one already exist in other municipalities like San Jose and Alameda County.

It builds on a 2022 city law targeting those who attend these events, making it a misdemeanor for those within 200 feet of a street takeover. Tuesday’s vote also included an amendment that exempts accredited news reporters from the existing spectator ban.

The city’s northernmost 9th City Council District, where the proposal originated, continues to claim the majority of reported street races across Long Beach, with more instances reported there than other parts of the city combined.

Ninth District Councilmember Joni Ricks-Oddie said the law was a direct response to what her constituents experience regularly.

“Illegal street racing and sideshows remain some of the most dangerous public safety challenges in our city,” she said.

Between 2022 and 2023, the police received 349 calls about street racing or other exhibitions of speed — 210 of which were in Ricks-Oddie’s district that encompasses most of the city above South Street. When asked, police did not provide more up-to-date statistics.

Councilmember Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, whose district borders Rick-Oddie’s, said in the Longwood neighborhood, sideshows are a common occurrence on Susana Road, a street that borders unincorporated land and is next to an elementary school.

“Reckless driving is harmful for everyone,” she said. “It is unacceptable in areas that are highly utilized by children, and we must return our streets and neighborhoods to a state of normalcy.”

In the city’s plan to eliminate all vehicular deaths by 2026, commonly known as Vision Zero, a survey section found nearly a quarter of respondents listed traffic enforcement as the top priority. Ahead of the 2026 budget, respondents ranked public safety among the top three priorities for the city.

The city also plans to install three automated speeding ticket cameras in the 9th District, along Artesia Boulevard from Harbor Avenue to Butler Avenue; Atlantic Avenue from the L.A. River to Artesia Boulevard; and Long Beach Boulevard from Artesia Boulevard to 70th Street.

Long Beach is on track to have more than 50 traffic deaths this year.

Millions of Americans have shed pounds with help from drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound.

But people who take these drugs often experience unpleasant side effects.

"They lose weight, which is a positive thing," says Warren Yacawych of the University of Michigan, "but they experience such severe nausea and vomiting that patients stop treatment."

So at this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, Yacawych and other researchers held a session to describe their efforts to understand and solve the side-effect problem.

The weight-loss products are called GLP-1 agonists. They work by mimicking a hormone that reduces appetite and slows digestion.

Yacawych and his colleagues wanted to know if they could tweak these drugs to suppress appetite without making people queasy.

The team focused on two areas in the brain stem where GLP-1 drugs have a big effect.

"The first is affectionately known as the brain stem's vomit center," Yacawych says. "It's naturally designed to detect any accidentally ingested toxin and coordinate the feeling of nausea and the vomit response."

The second area monitors food intake and tells people when they're full.

The team found a way to direct GLP-1 to the area involved in feeling full, while keeping the drug out of the vomit center.

When the researchers did this, the mice no longer felt sick. But they also didn't get thin — probably because there are specific cells in the vomit center that do not induce vomiting but are critical to weight loss.

"So it's very challenging," Yacawych says, "to be able to separate these side effects, like nausea, from GLP-1's intended effects, like weight loss."

A possible workaround came from a team led by Ernie Blevins of the University of Washington. They gave obese rats a low dose of a GLP-1 drug along with the hormone oxytocin, which is itself an appetite suppressant. That allowed the rats to lose weight without feeling sick.

Not just nausea

Another side effect of GLP-1 drugs is a decrease in thirst, which could be dangerous for people who are already losing lots of fluids from side effects like vomiting and diarrhea.

"If you're in that state of dehydration and you're not feeling thirsty to replace those fluids, that would be a problem," says Derek Daniels of the University at Buffalo.

To understand how GLP-1 drugs reduce thirst, Daniels and a team began studying the brains of rats. And they got lucky.

"We had a happy accident in the lab," Daniels says. "And the happy accident involved a rat called the Brattleboro rat."

Brattleboro rats are laboratory rodents with a genetic mutation that makes them thirsty nearly all the time. But the scientists discovered that these rats are also very sensitive to GLP-1 drugs, which drastically reduced their water consumption.

The team studied the rats' brains to see where GLP-1 was influencing thirst. That led them to several areas of the brain that appear to affect thirst but not appetite.

The discovery could help scientists preserve thirst by designing drugs that "target good places but not bad places," Daniels says.

Appetite and addiction

A team from the University of Virginia found that GLP-1 drugs are already targeting a brain area that plays a role in addiction as well as eating. It's a region involved in emotion and the reward system.

When the researchers delivered GLP-1 to this brain area in mice, it reduced their desire for "rewarding food, like a burger," says Ali D. Güler of the University of Virginia.

But the animals continued to eat healthy, nonrewarding foods, he says — a bit like people choosing a salad bar over dessert.

Identifying this brain area should help scientists find GLP-1 drugs that target the reward system while avoiding areas involved in appetite, Güler says. And that could lead to new treatments for alcoholism and other substance use disorders.

The finding also could explain the observation that people who take GLP-1 agonists tend to reduce their consumption of alcohol.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that found Texas' 2026 congressional redistricting plan pushed by President Donald Trump likely discriminates on the basis of race.

The order signed by Justice Samuel Alito will remain in place at least for the next few days while the court considers whether to allow the new map favorable to Republicans to be used in the midterm elections.

The court's conservative majority has blocked similar lower court rulings because they have come too close to elections.

The order came about an hour after the state called on the high court to intervene to avoid confusion as congressional primary elections approach in March. The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

The order was signed by Alito because he is the justice who handles emergency appeals from Texas.

Texas redrew its congressional map in the summer as part of Trump's efforts to preserve a slim Republican majority in the House in next year's elections, touching off a nationwide redistricting battle. The new redistricting map was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats, but a panel of federal judges in El Paso ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the civil rights groups that challenged the map on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters were likely to win their case.

If that ruling eventually holds, Texas could be forced to hold elections next year using the map drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021 based on the 2020 census.

Texas was the first state to meet Trump's demands in what has become an expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the state's new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats there.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

The Supreme Court is separately considering a case from Louisiana that could further limit race-based districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It's not entirely clear how the current round of redistricting would be affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.