WASHINGTON, D.C. — Protracted debates over coronavirus emergency funding and the future of the Supreme Court have left little time for other legislative business. Before the pandemic, Democrats and Republicans engaged in robust debates about how to help a vulnerable population — student loan borrowers dealing with debt, the second-largest class of consumer debt in America.

"At nearly every turn, you see people getting ripped off by predatory student loan companies from big banks to small scams, to debt collectors, to servicers, to lenders," said Seth Frotman, founder of the Student Borrower Protection Center in an interview in his office earlier this year.

Frotman is so passionate about this crisis, he left his job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2018, claiming among other issues that the Trump administration was working to hide a report that detailed how banks were passing on unnecessary fees to student borrowers. The administration argued they scaled down Frotman's group for efficiency and didn't comment widely on his resignation at the time. Frotman now advocates for new industry-wide rules to protect borrowers through his nonprofit.

"Student loan borrowers have less rights and less protections than nearly any other type of person with debt. If you have a mortgage, if you have a credit card and something goes wrong, you are protected. If a company tries to rip you off, you have rights and the ability to hold them accountable. Many of those protections don’t exist for student loan borrowers," said Frotman.

"The student loan debt crisis is often portrayed as some mistake. How did this happen? But there are no trillion-dollar mistakes. We are in the mess that we are in because there are decisions at the federal level, at the state level, that have left millions of American families with over a trillion dollars of debt," he added.

Some of the legislation Frotman supports includes the Fair Student Loan Debt Collection Practices Act that would prohibit a debt collector from collecting on federal student loan debt owed by a borrower earning under a certain income. The bill has failed to advance. 

Congressman Brett Guthrie of Bowling Green, Kentucky has introduced bills over the past several years that would strengthen loan counseling requirements for higher education institutions that participate in federal student aid programs but Frotman says poor counseling is not the core problem.

According to the Brookings Institution, almost 40% of U.S. student borrowers will default on their loans by 2023.