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Nearly half of college students surveyed earlier this year said that they expected to be helped by the federal government’s various student loan forgiveness programs, but new government figures suggest that their hoped-for windfall won’t be that generous, according to a Bloomberg News commentary yesterday. The U.S. Department of the Education projects that borrowers who next year enroll in loan forgiveness programs would, on average, repay every penny they borrowed. Some debtors in the programs, which cap monthly payments relative to earnings and offer the possibility of debt forgiveness, are projected to pay as much as 76 percent more than they borrowed. The forgiven amount would largely be interest that accrued over what could be as long as 25 years of making payments. In fact, the government projects that just 53 percent of debtors who’d enroll in these plans in the 2018 fiscal year would receive any forgiveness at all, according to estimates made public on Wednesday. Even that estimate may be too high, separate government figures suggest. Less than half of all government-owned student debt (by dollar volume) belongs to people enrolled in income-based repayment plans, Education Department data show.

The Trump administration is considering moving responsibility for overseeing more than $1 trillion in student debt from the Education Department to the Treasury Department, a switch that would radically change the system that helps 43 million students finance higher education, the New York Times reported today. The potential change surfaced in a scathing resignation memo sent late Tuesday night by James Runcie, the head of the Education Department’s federal student aid program. Runcie, an Obama-era holdover, was appointed in 2011 and reappointed in 2015. He cut short his term, which was slated to run until 2020, after clashing with the Trump administration and Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, over this proposal and other issues. A shift in handling federal student aid is being weighed as the Trump administration and DeVos consider overhauling the Department of Education. Trump’s proposed budget for 2018 slashes funding for the department by nearly 50 percent.

Several federal judges hearing a constitutional challenge to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s structure yesterday called into question whether the agency’s critics are right in their argument that it has inflated powers that unfairly limit presidential authority, MorningConsult.com reported yesterday. The en banc hearing of the case, PHH v. CFPB, provided the rare opportunity of seeing two federal government agencies face off in federal court. A panel of 11 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard the case to decide whether they should uphold a separate panel’s 2016 decision authored by one of their colleagues, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, which faulted the agency’s single-director structure. Judge Kavanaugh, a member of the en banc panel, openly promoted that decision at yesterday’s hearing, and provided rhetorical backup for critics who charge that the CFPB’s structure make it uniquely unaccountable. Under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the president can only fire the CFPB’s director for cause before the position’s five-year term ends.

New consumer protections requiring financial advisers to put their customers’ interests ahead of their own — at least when handling their retirement money — will take effect next month, putting to rest the question of whether they would be delayed further, the New York Times reported today. The fate of the so-called fiduciary rule, created under the Obama administration, was called into doubt when President Trump signed an executive order seeking a review of it, prompting regulators to delay its implementation to June from April. On Tuesday, Alexander Acosta, the Labor Department secretary, said that the basic principles of the rule would indeed take effect on June 9, even as his agency continues to review its finer details. After careful review, the Labor Department has “found no principled legal basis to change the June 9 date while we seek public input,” Acosta wrote in an opinion piece published Monday in The Wall Street Journal. “Respect for the rule of law leads us to the conclusion that this date cannot be postponed.”

A federal appeals court today will consider whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that was created after the 2008 financial crisis is constitutional, and whether the president has the authority to fire its director at will, the Wall Street Journal reported. The oral argument presents an opportunity for the Trump administration to lay out its case for curtailing the power of the CFPB, an independent agency fighting to keep its current structure headed by a single director. The hearing by the full bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit comes after a three-judge panel of the same court ruled in October that the bureau’s structure was unconstitutional and gave the president the power to fire its director for any reason. After a request from the CFPB, the appeals court vacated the panel’s ruling and scheduled a hearing by more judges. Currently, the CFPB chief can be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance,” a provision designed by a Democratic-controlled Congress to ensure the agency’s independence.