After the Department of Government Efficiency gained access to student loan databases, some social media posts promoted a federal privacy law as the key to debtholders’ financial freedom.
All you have to do, the posts said, is file a complaint with the Education Department requesting your loans be forgiven on the grounds that DOGE violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 by gaining access to personal loan information.
The law seeks to protect access to student education records from unauthorized parties and to give students, parents and guardians access to their own educational records.
“I’m about to get all my loans forgiven, and so are you,” a woman said in a Feb. 8 TikTok post. “Elon Musk being around our private, sensitive information is a definite breach of data and a violation of FERPA.”
“Elon Musk just made a massive mistake,” a man in March 14 TikTok post said, “And as a result of this mistake, people are getting their student loans forgiven and removed off of their credit report.”
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But if you’re looking for debt relief, we have bad news for you. Submitting a complaint on the basis of a violation of the 1974 student privacy law won’t forgive your loans.
These posts began cropping up on Feb. 9, after The Washington Post reported on Feb. 4 that DOGE gained access to 16 Department of Education and Office of Personnel Management databases, including student loan databases containing more than 40 million borrowers’ personally identifying information.
A federal judge in Maryland, on March 24, issued a preliminary injunction blocking DOGE from accessing people’s private data at the Education Department, the Treasury Department and the Office of Personnel Management and calling it a likely violation of federal privacy laws. The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Federation of Teachers and other labor unions against these federal agencies. The agencies have filed notice of their intent to appeal.
The University of California Student Association brought a separate but similar case against the Education Department; it is pending in a D.C. federal court.
These TikTok posts sharing template language for people to use to file Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act violation complaints to get their debts canceled are off-base. That’s because there’s no legal path for loan forgiveness through that law.
In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gonzaga v. Doe that although the Education Department can sue schools on the basis of violations of the 1974 law, individual people can’t.
The law applies to all educational institutions that receive federal funding. If the Education Department finds any school violating it, the department may withhold funding from the institution. Law violations extend to personal information collected as a result of educational data collection, such as grades, disciplinary records, and personally identifiable information. But it does not provide individual students with a direct legal course of action against their schools, nor does the law have any relationship to the federal loan process overseen by the Education Department, said LeRoy Rooker, former director of the Education Department’s Family Policy Compliance Office and an expert on this law.
“I’m not sure what you even have to go on here that would be any basis for filing a complaint,” Rooker told PolitiFact. “FERPA is protecting student privacy rights, giving students access to records, protecting the privacy of them, that sort of thing. And student loans are student loans. You have a legal obligation for repaying those, and a FERPA violation would have no relation.”
We rate the claim that you can have your student loans forgiven by completing a 1974 student privacy law violation complaint False.
