Trump and Ed Secretary McMahon have decreed that social workers, nurses (including ARNPs), physician assistants, physical therapists, educators, engineers, audiologists, architects, and accountants are not professionals.
Really?
Mollie, MSW
Our daughter, Mollie, is a clinical social worker. She helps people struggling with depression and anxiety and people who are desperately trying to overcome past traumas. She works with young women, vets suffering with PTSD. Her clinical internship was working with students who had lost a parent to gang violence in East New York. She’s also worked in a state foster care system. At one point early in her career she helped me conduct structured interviews of former jurors who had sat on a death penalty case I was defending in Georgia.
Mollie is trained in talk therapy; Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), which is particularly appropriate for helping with PTSD and anxiety disorders; and in ketamine-assisted therapy which may help a person break out of deep-seated depression. She’s licensed in a handful of states and is paid by most major insurers. She earned her BSW from the University of Vermont and her MSW from Fordham University. She then completed a 2000 hour internship at a school based clinic run by the prestigious Mt. Sinai Hospital at a huge, challenging high school in New York city.
Josh, MEd
Our son Josh is a certified middle school educator. He taught in Denver Public Schools for ten years and now teaches in Maine. He earned a BA from Oberlin College, an MS from Lesley College and an MEd from the University of Southern Maine. He is carefully evaluated in his teaching job every year. Families trust him every day to overcome challenging behaviors and engage their children in academic pursuits as they find their way from being children to becoming adults who contribute to our society.
Yet, the bloviator in chief, following a Heritage blueprint that he doesn’t know or understand, has decreed that neither of my kids are professionals.
Why?
It goes back to the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Trump and the Republicans must find ways to cut government spending to fund tax cuts and financial giveaways to his wealthy circle of donors. One way to do this is to reduce the federal student loans that the government offers or guarantees. The maximum for federal school loans that can be taken out is reduced from $200,000 to $100,000 by designating nurses, social workers, educators, and others as “non-professionals.” Professionals, such as physicians, psychologists, and most important, clergy, remain eligible for the full stroke of up to $200,000 in borrowing.
What makes an itinerant preacher a “professional” and a nurse practitioner not a “professional?” I wonder what Brother Will Campbell would have said about this choice of who is a professional and who is not.
Our family physician and friend, Rick, retired a few years ago. We switched to Karen, a nurse practitioner in the practice who is now our primary “physician.” We trust her advice as much as we trusted Rick’s advice. In fact, we’ve been seen by nurses and nurse practitioners for years. As anxious new parents, we sought out a pediatric practice staffed by nurse practitioners for our eldest, Josh. The practice, located in Concord, was called Health Dimensions. The practitioners’ goal was to spend quality time with their patients. We felt we received better attention and more nuanced care from Health Dimensions than we would have received from a standard physician run practice.
The physicians who ran Blue Cross/Blue Shield at the time must have felt threatened by the nurse practitioners at Health Dimensions because the Blues refused to cover the nurse practitioners even though they provided services within the scope of their licenses and even though the Blues paid for the exact same services (at higher rates) when provided by MDs. The photo of the president of Blue Cross signing a provider contract with the three founders of Health Dimensions, after we sued them, remains a treasured memento of the early years of my private law practice.
The state of NH cannot find enough nurses to staff its state hospital and state nursing home. As do many other states, it relies on traveling nurses provided by temp agencies that extract exorbitant fees. When I was on the executive council, I encouraged the state to fund more nursing programs to move students into a pipeline that would provide a good job and fill a pressing professional need for NH’s aging population.
How does Trump’s imbecilic declaration help encourage more young people to go into nursing? It doesn’t.
Limiting Public Service Loan Forgiveness
Trump and McMahon have also adopted rules to limit loan forgiveness through the Public Service Forgiveness Program (PSFP). $14.2 billion in loans have been forgiven in the last seven years. The new rules severely and arbitrarily restrict the agencies and entities for which a loan recipient may work to have his or her loan forgiven over time. Twenty one states, the District of Columbia and a number of non-profits, labor unions and cities sued the Trump administration in November to overturn the rule. Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts are part of the suit. NH is not. The PSFP was created by Congress in 2007 but forgiveness did not begin for some time. No part of the law gives Trump’s Education Department the authority or discretion to determine which non-profit programs are eligible. Find the complaint here.
The tie-in?
If the federal government doesn’t forgive loans, there’s more money to pay the tycoons under the Big Beautiful Bill. The side benefit is the administration gets to punish organizations with which it disagrees, like those supporting immigrants and immigration or diversity, equity and inclusion.
Ironically, it was six Republican states that sued Biden to undermine loan forgiveness in a suit that became the Supreme Court’s Biden v. Nebraska (2023) decision that invalidated Biden’s action in forgiving loans without Congressional approval. We’ll see if the Supreme Court applies the same logic to Trump’s limitation of the PSFP, also done without Congressional approval.
By the way, NH joined a coalition of Republican states in filing an amicus brief to prevent President Biden’s program from providing loan relief to young NH professionals (or non-professionals). I can’t imagine where the NH AG finds the time to file these briefs with all of its understaffing and drains on resources stemming from the need to investigate NH Supreme Court justices.
College and Graduate Education Should be More Affordable.
I’ll give credit to Trump for one thing. We shouldn’t encourage students to incur high levels of debt to earn their degrees. Trump’s approach, however, doesn’t help with this problem. We should, instead, focus on making community colleges tuition free and colleges and trade schools more affordable. Unfortunately, NH’s public colleges and universities are among the least affordable in the country and the Republicans under Governors Sununu and Ayotte have made it worse.
Before anyone comes at me for not discussing education and training in the trades, I agree that we need more people trained in the trades. Some of this training can happen at community colleges. Regardless, Trump’s foul decree does not affect people learning a trade. The denomination of these important jobs as “non-professional” is the point of this post.