Who exactly was the cruelty for? Because at Eliza’s last week in Georgetown, four people at the table had a niece, a nephew, or a vaguely described ‘family friend’s kid’ who was suddenly missing fifteen percent of a paycheck — and not one of them, not one, was willing to say out loud whether they thought this was good policy or bad.
They wanted to talk about the lamb. The lamb was excellent. The lamb was, in fact, the only subject on which the table reached unanimous consent all evening, which is itself a fairly damning statement about the Senate, the House, and our hostess’s wine selection.
Some context, for the three readers who haven’t checked their pay stub this month: the Education Department resumed involuntary collections on defaulted federal student loans in early May. Wages garnished. Tax refunds seized via the Treasury Offset Program. Social Security checks — yes, Social Security, for the retirees who never finished a degree they took out loans for in 1994 — clipped at the source. The pause that began under one administration and was extended, and extended, and extended, simply ended. No vote. No debate. A press release on a Friday.
The bipartisan lobbyist at the end of the table — I will only describe him as bipartisan, because he has worked for both parties and currently bills both — said it was ‘a return to normalcy.’ I asked him whose normalcy. He said, and I quote, ‘the spreadsheet’s.’ Then he asked for more wine, which is what people in this town do when they’ve accidentally said the quiet part.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has a civil servant’s gift for reading a memo the way the rest of us read a horoscope, told me the interesting part isn’t who’s being collected from. It’s who’s been quietly removed from the collection list. Certain categories. Certain ZIP codes. Certain political donors, one suspects, though Judy would never say that, because Judy still believes in the institution and I love her for it.
The cowardice here is bipartisan and it is breathtaking. The Republicans who spent four years calling student loan relief ‘welfare for the laptop class’ have gone strangely silent now that the garnishment notices are landing in counties they carried by twenty points. The Democrats who promised forgiveness from every podium between 2020 and 2024 have decided this week is a good week to talk about something else — anything else, please, possibly the heat dome. Both parties are betting you won’t notice the contradiction. Both parties are correct often enough that the bet keeps paying.
And the specific cruelty, the part nobody at Eliza’s wanted to hold in their mouth long enough to taste: the Treasury Offset Program is currently collecting from seventy-three-year-olds. Retirees. People who took out four thousand dollars in 1989 to attend a secretarial program that no longer exists, watched the interest compound for thirty-six years through every administration that promised to fix this, and are now having their Social Security reduced to satisfy a debt to a federal government that has, in the meantime, forgiven roughly nine hundred billion dollars in PPP loans without garnishing a single yacht.
I asked the table — gently, because it was Eliza’s lamb and Eliza’s table — whether anyone wanted to defend the moral coherence of that arrangement. The bipartisan lobbyist examined his cufflink. A senior counsel for a Senate committee discovered something fascinating in her napkin. Eliza, bless her, said, ‘Margaret, please,’ which is what Georgetown says instead of an answer.
Here is the warning, and you can take it or leave it. A country that resumes garnishing the wages of seventy-three-year-old defaulters while its political class quietly debates which donor categories to exempt is not a country running on policy. It is a country running on whoever was too tired, too poor, or too unconnected to make the phone call. We used to call that something. We used to be embarrassed by it. At Eliza’s, last Thursday, we called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe.