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Panic and confusion: Student-loan borrowers scramble after getting kicked off Biden’s key affordable repayment plan

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Ashley Grupe’s monthly student-loan payments have been $54 for the past three years. This fall, they’ll likely surge to $644.

“When I saw that number, I just froze,” the 34-year-old told Business Insider. “That’s ‘I need a second job’ kind of money.”

Grupe’s payments are skyrocketing after former President Joe Biden’s SAVE student-loan repayment plan was eliminated last month.

Dozens of student-loan borrowers told Business Insider they’re worried that, with SAVE gone, they won’t be able to afford higher monthly payments. While the Trump administration is introducing a new income-driven repayment plan this summer, it’s less generous than existing plans and would mean borrowers pay higher amounts over a longer timeline.

Former President Joe Biden created SAVE to give borrowers cheaper monthly payments and a shorter timeline to loan forgiveness. Litigation blocked the plan in July 2024, and enrolled borrowers were not required to make payments. However, in March, a federal judge approved President Donald Trump’s settlement to eliminate the plan, forcing 7 million enrolled borrowers back into repayment earlier than anticipated.


Ashley Grupe

Ashley Grupe said she’ll have to reconfigure her budget to afford her student-loan payments without the SAVE plan. 

Courtesy of Ashley Grupe



Grupe, who works on water quality for the state of Missouri, has $76,000 in outstanding student loans from her two degrees in environmental science. She’s pursuing the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after 10 years of qualifying payments. She has 21 remaining payments to qualify for relief. But she said the $644 a month payments she’s facing without SAVE put that relief out of reach given her $77,000 income.

The Department of Education has encouraged SAVE borrowers to switch to a new plan as soon as possible, saying it would give them more time to incorporate their new payments into their budgets. Grupe said it’s not that easy.

“I knew going in that I was going to have to pay it back. I understand I have that long-term obligation,” Grupe said. While she intends to keep making payments, she said the obligation becomes unrealistic “when it absolutely buries you.”

‘It’s been very chaotic’

Joseph Strafaci, 38, said the SAVE plan was “phenomenal.” He was making $800 payments, which were affordable given his income as a senior project manager. Without SAVE, he would have been paying nearly $2,000 a month.

When he received an email from the Department of Education telling him to get off the SAVE plan, he said it created confusion surrounding the future of his student-loan repayment.

“It’s been very chaotic, and I am panicked because I don’t know the timeline for these things,” Strafaci said. “I was under the assumption I had until 2028 to make a decision.”

Strafaci is referring to the original timeline for SAVE to be phased out. Trump’s “big beautiful” spending legislation would have eliminated SAVE in 2028, but the settlement allowed the administration to ax the plan earlier than scheduled.


Jordan Hendrickson

Jordan Hendrickson said higher student-loan payments without the SAVE plan would impede her retirement savings. 

Courtesy of Jordan Hendrickson



The Department of Education said enrolled borrowers who have not yet switched plans will begin receiving emails from their servicers in July, giving them 90 days to switch. If they don’t, their servicer will move them to a new plan.

“For years, borrowers have been caught in a confusing cycle of uncertainty, but the Trump Administration’s policy is simple: if you take out a loan, you must pay it back,” said Nicholas Kent, the department’s undersecretary.

For Jordan Hendrickson, the confusion continues to permeate. Henrickson, 54, has been making $326 monthly payments on SAVE. They are projected to surge to $2,100, which she said is “anxiety-provoking” and will prevent her from putting any money into her retirement savings.

“It’s definitely going to squeeze my budget, along with energy costs, housing costs, all the costs. It’s so mind-blowing,” Hendrickson said. “The SAVE plan felt like a life vest.”

Have a story to share about student loans? Contact this reporter at asheffey@businessinsider.com.




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It is an ‘age of confusion’ as consultants try to measure the real value of AI

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Big questions are swirling around AI’s real impact — and consultants are racing to supply the answers.

Over the past year, consulting firms have begun deploying armies of AI agents as they work to transform their own operations and advise clients to do the same — automating research, building task-specific tools, and building proprietary AI models.

McKinsey & Company CEO Bob Sternfels said last month that his firm has launched tens of thousands of internal AI agents in recent years, and eventually plans to have one for all of the company’s 40,000 employees.

Amid the rapid rollout, consultants are now asking themselves a tough question: Is it worth it? They are working to measure if AI is truly improving performance, boosting revenue, and freeing consultants to focus on higher-value work.

“I think we are now in the age of confusion,” Mina Alaghband, a former McKinsey partner, now the chief customer officer at Writer, a full-stack enterprise AI platform built for agentic AI, told Business Insider.

Alaghband said that a year ago, most companies were focused on adoption, tracking metrics such as how often a tool was used.

Now, she says said the emphasis should be on measuring the value that’s created — like the amount of human labor reassigned to higher-value work, or improvements in revenue.

PwC’s chief AI officer, Dan Priest, recently told Business Insider that PwC is now less concerned with how many agents it deploys, and more with how many human users each agent has.

Priest said his firm starts by targeting an “impact zone,” such as improving the customer experience.

Within these impact zones, the firm looks to deploy “specialized AI agents” that have earned that designation because they’re good at what they do, Priest said. “When we deploy agents, we want to see a high rate of human adoption, which means more humans are using them,” he said.

EY also prioritizes quality over quantity, Steve Newman, EY’s global engineering chief, told Business Insider. The firm tracks the value created by its AI agents through key performance indicators for productivity, quality, and cost efficiency on a month-to-month basis.

If the defining promises of the AI boom are speed and efficiency, then the metric that may matter more isn’t usage, but time reclaimed.

Boston Consulting Group tracks its agents by that metric — and whether that time is then reinvested in higher-value work, Scott Wilder, a partner and managing director based in Dallas, told Business Insider.

Wilder said humans at the firm now spend about 15% less time on low-value activities, like making slideshows, and that those people are reinvesting about 70% of their saved time into higher-value activities, such as deeper analysis.

Time saved doesn’t always mean more work. At BCG, it can mean more free time. Wilder said BCG has found that employees keep about 30% of the time AI saves. “They get a little more sleep or get to go to a yoga class or whatever someone wants to do,” he said.

Nearly a century ago, economist John Keynes predicted that as productivity rose, the balance between work and leisure would inevitably change.

“I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is,” he wrote in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”

It’s almost 2030, but in small ways, that vision may already be surfacing.

“It’s benefiting them — and this is a tough job, so every hour of free time matters,” Wilder said.

Something to share about how consultants are using AI? Business Insider would like to hear from you. Email Lakshmi Varanasi at lvaranasi@businessinsider.com or contact her on Signal at lvaranasi.70.




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The US military’s drone-defense confusion is leaving its bases vulnerable, Pentagon watchdog finds

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A Pentagon watchdog report is warning that gaps in Pentagon policy are leaving some US military bases vulnerable to drone threats.

The report, released Tuesday by the Pentagon’s Inspector General, said that the military lacks consistent guidance for defending sensitive “covered assets” — US-based sites legally authorized to use certain counter-drone defenses — against offensive uncrewed aircraft, a problem exacerbated by jumbled, contradictory policies across the services.

While the Defense Department has issued multiple counter-UAS policies — rules governing how the military can detect, disrupt, or disable uncrewed aerial systems — those directives are not standardized, leaving some base leaders unaware that their installations qualify as “covered assets.” The term refers to locations within the US that deal with sensitive missions like nuclear deterrence, missile defense, presidential protection, air defense, and “high yield” explosives.

That lack of awareness derived from confusing policy risks leaving bases exposed to uncrewed threats, a growing concern.

The Inspector General report examines 10 military installations where drone incursions have occurred. The watchdog assessment found multiple examples of “covered assets” left uncovered due to unclear policies.

The Air Force base in Arizona where most F-35 pilots are trained, for instance, is not authorized to defend against UAS incursions because pilot training does not qualify as a “covered” activity under Pentagon policy, despite the Air Force describing the F-35 as “an indispensable tool in future homeland defense.”

Another Air Force facility in California that manufactures aircraft repair parts, conducts aircraft maintenance, and makes the Global Hawk, an ultra-advanced large surveillance drone that costs more than the F-35A, has also been left vulnerable, and the site experienced a series of drone incursions in 2024, the report said.

“Air Force officials told us that the government-owned, contractor-operated facility was denied coverage during the active incursions,” in 2024, the IG report says.

The problem extends beyond determining whether a site is covered. The process for obtaining counter-drone systems — and securing rapid legal approval to use them when needed — is complex and slow, reflecting legal restrictions on using electronic jamming or force inside the US, the report found.


A contractor hand-launches a drone at a counter-UAV training site in California in January 2020.

A contractor hand-launches a drone at a counter-UAV training site in California in January 2020.

PFC Gower Liu/US Army



The growing counter-drone problem

Concerns about drone threats to military installations have grown in recent years as small, inexpensive commercial drones have become dramatically more popular and easy to use. Such systems lower the barrier to entry on surveillance and precision strike from the state level to non-state actors and can create challenges for security personnel who are often constrained in their response options, or improperly trained and equipped to react.

In 2024, multiple bases within the US and abroad experienced strings of drone incursions, events that can involve one or more unmanned aircraft entering restricted airspace or operating close enough to installations to trigger alarms, even when the drones are not linked to foreign adversaries.

“In recent years, adversary unmanned systems have evolved rapidly,” a Department of Defense counter-drone strategy released in the final months of the Biden administration said. “These cheap systems are increasingly changing the battlefield, threatening US installations, and wounding or killing our troops.”

Efforts to address the drone problem have been in the works for years, though a Center for New American Security report released last September said the military’s efforts were “hindered by insufficient scale and urgency.”

Some units have received counter-drone tools such as portable “flyaway kits” — deployable systems meant to be moved quickly between sites — and the “Dronebuster,” a handheld electronic-warfare device that emits a signal to disrupt or disable an offending drone. The Army secretary recently questioned the latter system’s effectiveness, underscoring broader uncertainty about how best to defend US bases from the growing drone threat.

The US military is trying to catch up with the threat, to develop defenses as fast or faster than drone technology is currently developing, driven in large part by the drone-dominant Ukraine war. As he announced the creation of Joint Interagency Task Force 401 last August, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said “there’s no doubt that the threats we face today from hostile drones grow by the day.”

“The challenge for airspace management is how to deter or defeat such incursions without endangering the surrounding civilian communities or legitimate air traffic. That rules out everything kinetic,” Mark Cancian, a defense expert and retired US Marine Corps colonel, told Business Insider in late 2024 during a series of incursions.

“This has become a huge problem for both military and civilian airfields and will get worse and drone usage proliferates further,” he said.




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