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President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday in an attempt to shut down the Education Department.

“We are sending education back to the states, where it so rightly belongs,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement after Mr. Trump signed the order.

But they are not about to let debtors off the hook. Those states, after all, are not banks, and the Education Department is a big bank in all but name. It lends tens of billions of dollars to students and parents each year and oversees the collection of roughly $1.6 trillion in outstanding loans for over 40 million borrowers.

The debt-ridden federal government isn’t going to give up that money. So if the Education Department closed, another federal entity would take the loan system over. In the short term, any agency inheriting the loan portfolio would need to keep the servicers

Keep reading this article on The New York Times Your Money.

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