Public Service Loan Forgiveness is not a handout — it’s a promise made to the public workers who keep our state running – and has a direct impact on the services these workers provide to our communities. Nurses and doctors, teachers and researchers, public safety officers and caretakers, engineers and social workers — all of them chose service over higher private-sector salaries with the understanding that after ten years of public service, their federal student loans would be forgiven.

Now the federal administration is attacking the once bipartisan PSLF promise, threatening the benefit for all of Connecticut’s public sector workers. Public sector workers are the people who keep our streets safe and our children fed and our hospitals running. And just as private sector workers have been let down by broken promises — from the weakening of labor protections to the near-dismantling of the National Labor Relations Board — public sector workers are now facing the same playbook: make a promise, benefit from their labor, then pull the rug out from under them.

Public service workers face uncertainty, ridicule, lower pay and hard work every day. PSLF is a small way to repay them for their sacrifice. Failing to uphold this promise doesn’t just hurt workers, it undermines every classroom, clinic, and community that depends on these individuals and services in their everyday lives.