June 24, 2026
43 million of you student loan borrowers may want to pay attention to this. Today, one House Democrat and two House Republicans filed a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill that would significantly cut down your student loan interest rate.
If you didn’t know, the interest rates on federal student loans are really high. Depending on the loan, borrowers are paying between 6 and almost 9 percent in just interest. And for lots of borrowers, that interest just gets out of hand, and eventually the loan balance grows bigger than it was when the loan was taken out.
Well, today Representative Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida, joined Republican Representatives Mike Lawler from New York and Anna Paulina Luna from Florida to file a discharge petition that would force the Affordable Loans for Students Act to the floor of the House for a vote.
That bill, if passed, would cap the federal student loan interest rate at 2 percent. That 2 percent rate would apply to not only new federal student loans, but also existing federal student loans and even federal student loans that are not currently owned by the federal government.
If passed, this bill would automatically refinance all those loans to a 2 percent interest rate. The bill says that refinancing would happen without you having to do a thing. You could choose not to refinance to 2 percent, but if you want it, it would happen automatically.
The bill also prohibits the government, or whichever company owns your federal student loan, from extending your repayment period because of the refinancing and would prohibit them from changing your repayment terms.
But is this actually going to happen?
Well, the bipartisan group of lawmakers behind this discharge petition seem to think they have a real shot. But the reality is it’s going to be an uphill climb.
Discharge petitions are hard because the Speaker of the House, in this case Mike Johnson, is in charge of the House floor. The Speaker gets to decide which bills go to the floor for a vote. And this ain’t one.
But there’s a mechanism called a discharge petition that rank-and-file House members can use to go around the Speaker and get their bill on the floor without his approval.
In order to override the Speaker, the sponsors of the discharge petition need to collect 218 signatures from sitting House members. Once the discharge petition gets 218 signatures, then there’s a short waiting period, and after that the Speaker must schedule the bill for a vote regardless of if he approves of it or not.
Now, discharge petitions historically have been very unsuccessful. It’s really difficult to collect 218 signatures and override the Speaker. So I don’t want to get your hopes up on this one.
But discharge petitions aren’t impossible. In fact, one of the most famous cases of a successful discharge petition happened just last year when a Republican and Democrat successfully pushed the Epstein Files Transparency Act to the floor of the House for a vote over the objection of Speaker Johnson. That bill ultimately passed almost unanimously in both the House and the Senate, and that’s how we all got to see those Epstein files. A discharge petition made that happen.
So if this 2 percent student loan interest rate is something you’re interested in, and you want to see it happen, I suggest you contact your House lawmaker right now and tell him or her to sign this discharge petition.
More from the petition sponsors here.
See the original bill text here.
