A new federal lawsuit is trying to answer a question more than 1.5 million student loan borrowers have been asking: did the Department of Education actually cancel the loans it publicly promised to forgive?

The Project on Predatory Student Lending (PPSL) sued the Department (PDF File) on July 1, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, after the agency sat on fifteen Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (some for more than two and a half years) seeking records on how it carried out its announced group discharges.

The College Investor team has previously filed similar FOIA requests for borrower defense data, the latest with a response in 2023, which took roughly 14 months to process.