President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that aims to limit eligibility for a popular student loan forgiveness program.

According to Trump’s executive order, borrowers employed by organizations that do work involving “illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property and disruption of the public order” will “not be eligible for public service loan forgiveness.”

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2007, allows many not-for-profit and government employees to have their federal student loans canceled after 10 years of payments.

More from Personal Finance:
DOGE layoffs may ‘overwhelm’ unemployment system
Education Department cuts leave student loan borrowers in the dark
Congress’ proposed Medicaid cuts may impact economy

The order says that PSLF “has misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest, but actually harm our national security and American values.”

Consumer advocates say that is not accurate, and were quick to condemn Trump’s move, accusing the president of depriving debt forgiveness to those who work in fields he does not approve of.

“The PSLF program, which was created by Congress almost 20 years ago, does not permit the administration to pick and choose which non-profits should qualify,” said Jessica Thompson, senior vice president of The Institute for College Access & Success.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request from CNBC for comment.

Here’s what borrowers in the program need to know.

In his first few weeks in office, Trump’s executive orders have targeted immigrants, transgender and nonbinary people and those who work to increase diversity across the private and public sector. Many nonprofits work in these spaces, providing legal support or doing advocacy and education work.

“Borrowers that work for those organizations are concerned,” said Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit.

“I also suspect that this will be challenged in court,” Mayotte said. “The bottom line is that 501(c)(3)s are eligible for PSLF under the law. An EO can’t change.”

Changes also can’t be retroactive, she said. That means that if you are currently working for or previously worked for an organization that the Trump administration later excludes from the program, you’ll still get credit for that time, at least up until the changes go into effect.

For now, those pursuing PSLF should print out a copy of their payment history on StudentAid.gov. Keep a record of the number of qualifying payments you’ve made so far.

With the PSLF help tool, borrowers can search for a list of qualifying employers and access the employer certification form. Try to fill out this form at least once a year, experts say.

President Donald Trump has spoken of tariffs as a job-creating behemoth.

Tariffs will “create jobs like we have never seen before,” Trump said Tuesday during a joint session of Congress.

Economists disagree.

In fact, the tariff policies Trump has pursued since taking office would likely have the opposite effect, they said.

“It costs American jobs,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s.

He categorized tariffs imposed broadly as a “lose-lose.”

“There are no winners here in the trade war we’re seemingly being engulfed in,” Zandi said. 

Trump has imposed an additional duty of 20% on all imports from China. He put 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, the U.S.’ two biggest trade partners. (Just days after those took effect, the president delayed levies on some products for a month.)

Tariffs of 25% on steel and aluminum are set to take effect Wednesday, while duties on copper and lumber and reciprocal tariffs on all U.S. trade partners could be coming in the not-too-distant future.

There’s a deceptively simple logic to the protective power of such economic policy.

Tariffs generally aim to help U.S. companies compete more effectively with foreign competitors, by making it more expensive for companies to source products from overseas. U.S. products look more favorable, thereby lending support to domestic industry and jobs.

There’s some evidence of such benefits for targeted industries.

For example, steel tariffs during Trump’s first term reduced imports of steel from other nations by 24%, on average, over 2018 to 2021, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission. They also raised U.S. steel prices and domestic production by about 2% each, the report said.

New steel tariffs set to take effect March 12 would also “likely boost” steel prices, Shannon O’Neil and Julia Huesa, researchers at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in February.

Higher prices would likely benefit U.S. producers and add jobs to the steel industry’s current headcount, around 140,000, they said.

While tariffs’ protection may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper.

Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote.

These spillover effects hurt other sectors of the economy, ultimately costing jobs, economists said.  

Take steel, for example.

Steel tariffs raise production costs for the manufacturing sector and other steel-intensive U.S. industries, like automobiles, farming machinery, household appliances, construction and oil drilling, O’Neil and Huesa wrote.

Cox studied the effects of steel tariffs imposed by former president George W. Bush in 2002-03, and found they were responsible for 168,000 fewer jobs per year in steel-using industries, on average — more jobs than there are in the entire steel sector.

Tariffs are a “pretty blunt instrument,” said Cox during a recent webinar for the Harvard Kennedy School.

They create “a lot of collateral damage,” she added.

Tariffs imposed during Trump’s first-term — on products like washing machines, steel and aluminum — hit $290 billion of U.S. imports with an average 24% tariff by August 2019, according to a 2020 paper published by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Those levies ultimately translated to a 2% tariff on all U.S. exports after accounting for foreign retaliation, it found.

“A tax on imports is effectively a tax on exports,” Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, wrote last year for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

More from Personal Finance:
Medicaid cuts may include work requirements
DOGE layoffs may ‘overwhelm’ unemployment system
Who benefits from Trump tax cuts?

Damage to the U.S. economy from those first-term Trump tariffs “clearly” amounted to “many times” more than the wages of newly created jobs, economists Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, and Phil Gramm, a former U.S. senator (R-Texas), wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

(President Joe Biden kept most of Trump’s tariffs in place.)

U.S. trade partners have already begun fighting back against Trump’s recent tranche of tariffs.

China put tariffs of up to 15% on many U.S. agricultural goods — which are the largest U.S. exports to China — starting Monday. Canada also put $21 billion of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods like orange juice, peanut butter, coffee, appliances, footwear, cosmetics, motorcycles and paper products.

President Trump alluded to the potential economic pain of his tariff policies during his address to Congress.

“There will be a little disturbance, but we are okay with that,” he said. “It won’t be much.”

While many economists don’t yet forecast a U.S. recession, Trump in a Fox News interview on Sunday didn’t rule out the possibility of a downturn as tariffs take effect — though he said the economy would benefit in the long term. If a recession were to happen, it would weigh on protected sectors, too, economists said.

Voters elected President Trump with a mandate to institute an economic agenda that includes tariffs, Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the White House, said in an e-mailed statement.

“Tariffs played a key role in the industrial ascent of the United States stretching back to the 1800s through William McKinley’s presidency,” Desai said.

There is a historical precedent for the trade war that’s breaking out: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, which triggered a reduction in exports and failed to boost agricultural prices for the farmers it sought to protect, Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote in a 2024 paper.

Economists also believe the Smoot-Hawley tariff exacerbated the Great Depression.

While a nearly century-old economic policy doesn’t necessarily point to what will happen in the modern era, protectionist policies from the post-2017 years have — like Smoot-Hawley — “had disappointing results,” Strain wrote.

Evidence from recent years suggests protectionism may actually hurt the workers it seeks to help, Strain said.

For example, Trump’s first-term tariffs reduced total manufacturing employment by a net 2.7%, Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, economists at the Federal Reserve Board, wrote in 2024. That’s after accounting for a 0.4% boost to employment in manufacturing jobs protected by tariffs, they found.

The 2018-19 trade war “failed to revive domestic manufacturing” and actually reduced jobs in the broad manufacturing sector, Strain wrote.

The share of U.S. employment coming from manufacturing jobs has been falling since the end of World War II, largely because technological advances have increased workers’ productivity, Strain said. It would be more helpful to direct economic policy toward connecting workers to jobs of the future, he said.

“Trade — like technological advances — is disruptive, but attempts to entomb the U.S. economy in amber are not a helpful response,” he wrote.

If you receive more Social Security benefits than you are owed, you may face a 100% default withholding rate from your monthly checks once a new policy goes into effect.

The change announced last week by the Social Security Administration marks a reversal from a 10% default withholding rate that was put in place last year after some beneficiaries received letters demanding immediate repayments for sums that were sometimes tens of thousands of dollars.

The discrepancy — called overpayments — happens when Social Security beneficiaries receive more money than they are owed.

The erroneous payment amounts may occur when beneficiaries fail to report to the Social Security Administration changes in their circumstances that may affect their benefits, according to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report. Overpayments can also happen if the agency does not process the information promptly or due to errors in the way data was entered, how a policy was applied or in the administrative process, according to the report.

More from Personal Finance:
DOGE layoffs may ‘overwhelm’ unemployment system
Education Department cuts leave student loan borrowers in the dark
Congress’ proposed Medicaid cuts may impact economy

The Social Security Administration paid about $6.5 billion in retirement and disability benefit overpayments in fiscal year 2022, which represents 0.5% of total benefits paid, the Congressional Research Service said in its 2024 report. The agency also paid about $4.6 billion in overpayments for Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, benefits in that year, or about 8% of total benefits paid.

The Social Security Administration recovered about $4.9 billion in Social Security and SSI overpayments in fiscal year 2023. However, the agency had about $23 billion in uncollected overpayments at the end of the 2023 fiscal year, according to the Congressional Research Service.

By defaulting to a 100% withholding rate for overpayments, the Social Security Administration said it may recover about $7 billion in the next decade.  

“We have the significant responsibility to be good stewards of the trust funds for the American people,” Lee Dudek, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, said in a statement. “It is our duty to revise the overpayment repayment policy back to full withholding, as it was during the Obama administration and first Trump administration, to properly safeguard taxpayer funds.”

Social Security beneficiaries who are overpaid benefits after March 27 will automatically be subject to the new 100% withholding rate.

Individuals affected will have the right to appeal both the overpayment decision and the amount, according to the agency. They may also ask for a waiver of the overpayment, if either they cannot afford to pay the money back or if they believe they are not at fault. While an initial appeal or waiver is pending, the agency will not require repayment.

Beneficiaries who cannot afford to fully repay the Social Security Administration may also request a lower recovery rate either by calling the agency or visiting their local office.

For beneficiaries who had an overpayment before March 27, the withholding rate will stay the same and no action is required, the agency said.

At a March 2024 Senate committee hearing, O’Malley called the policy of intercepting 100% of a benefit check “clawback cruelty.”

At the same hearing, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Georgia, recalled how one constituent who was overpaid $58,000 could not afford to pay her rent after the Social Security Administration reduced her monthly checks.

Following the Social Security Administration’s announcement that it will return to 100% as the default withholding rate, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare said it is concerned the agency may be more susceptible to overpayment errors as it cuts staff.

“This action, ostensibly taken to cut costs at SSA, needlessly punishes beneficiaries who receive overpayment notices — usually through no fault of their own,” the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, an advocacy organization, said in a statement.