After 10 years as a psychologist for the New York State Office of Mental Health, Brady A. Berman was ready to have his $137,000 in student debt canceled through Public Service Loan Forgiveness.
He put in the years of service needed to qualify. But Berman was short six of the required 120 loan payments because the federal government placed his loans in forbearance while the courts decided the legality of his repayment plan, Saving on a Valuable Education.
A federal program, known as PSLF Buyback, was supposed to let Berman make a lump-sum payment to catch up. He submitted an application to the Education Department in February 2025. Berman is still waiting for a response.
Created in 2023 under the Biden administration, the buyback program gives borrowers a chance to recover lost time in their pursuit of Public Service Loan Forgiveness. PSLF cancels the education debt of government and nonprofit employees after 10 years of service and 120 monthly loan payments, but time spent in forbearance or deferment typically doesn’t count.
There is a backlog of roughly 82,000 applications for the PSLF Buyback program from public servants like Berman, according to the Education Department. People have waited months, and in some cases years, for a response from the department, which initially said the review would take 45 business days.
The delays have left many borrowers stuck and unsure: whether to keep paying, whether they can switch jobs or whether to take on a mortgage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt hanging over their head — debt the federal government promised to clear in exchange for their public service.
“It’s like being in a purgatory,” said Berman, 44, who lives in Queens. “You’re just waiting and waiting, hoping that email will come.”
Buyback lets public servants retroactively make a lump-sum payment covering what they would have paid to get credit for the forbearance period. Only people who have 10 years of qualifying employment can apply. If the Education Department approves the request, it sends an agreement detailing the total amount that must be paid within 90 days.
When the program started, staff within the department’s Office of Federal Student Aid were entirely responsible for processing applications. It was time-consuming as staff had to manually review records, but they mostly kept pace with the flow of submissions.
Things changed as the volume of applications soared and the Trump administration cut staff at the department, according to three people familiar with the review process who were not permitted to speak publicly. The already tedious process turned into a slog.
Applications streamed in from borrowers enrolled in the Save plan — a Biden-era program that offered low monthly payments. In 2024, the department postponed payments for Save enrollees while Republican-led states challenged the program. Those months in forbearance did not count toward PSLF, which led scores of borrowers on the Save plan to apply for the buyback program.
From May to July of 2025, the Education Department received an average of 10,743 applications, but only processed an average of 2,939, according to court records from an ongoing lawsuit filed last year by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) over stalled cancellation and buyback applications.
Bryan Durkee, 36, submitted his buyback request to send in seven payments he missed while in the Save forbearance in August 2025. The mental health counselor in Portland estimates it would cost him nearly $1,600 to catch up and qualify to have his $65,000 student loan balance forgiven.
Months went by without a word from the department. Durkee called the federal agency every three weeks, but no one could provide an update on the status of his request. After 10 months of waiting, he filed a complaint with the department, but remains in the dark about the status of his application.
The Education Department did not respond to questions about the delays.
“It’s irritating because I would like to move on and maybe pursue a trade like HVAC or plumbing,” Durkee said. “There is so much burnout in my profession, but I don’t want to make a switch without knowing what’s going to happen to my loans.”
As thousands of buyback applications continued to flow to the Education Department, the federal agency turned to student loan servicing companies for help in July. Servicers are working through the backlog, but some encountered coding errors that slowed them down, said the three officials. They said the errors have since been resolved.
Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, said she has seen an uptick in successful buyback requests in recent weeks, but mostly among people who have been waiting more than 600 days for a response.
The Education Department said it processed about 2,500 cases in August, which is largely on par with the pace reported in the AFT lawsuit a year ago. Still, the number of pending applications is trending down, declining nearly 7 percent since April, the last time the department reported numbers in the AFT lawsuit.
The Trump administration has imposed restrictions on the buyback program that could also limit future applications. The Education Department said its new Repayment Assistance Plan and Tiered Standard Repayment Plan are ineligible for the program. Since those are the only repayment options for new borrowers, the department has effectively cut them off from the PSLF buyback.
With his buyback request still up in the air, Berman, the psychologist in Queens, decided to take another route to loan forgiveness. In March, he left the Save plan and enrolled in an older income-driven repayment program that increased his $500 monthly student loan payment to $1,450.
Spending six months in the new repayment plan meant paying triple what he would have in the buyback program, but Berman said it was worth the expense to be done with his loans. He made his 120th payment in August and submitted his PSLF application, but the Education Department has yet to post the payment because of delays in its reporting system — leaving Berman stuck in a new limbo.
“It’s been like daily torture. I check my student aid account every single day, multiple times a day. I can’t believe I’m back here again,” he said.
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