Nurses are heroes. Trump’s DOE is an unprofessional fraud
Making health care more accessible for the public is not a high priority for this administration. Redesignating professional degrees for needed medical personnel is the latest blow.
Nursing left off federal professional degree list again
Nursing is excluded from the federal professional degree list and is impacting student loans. Advocates are pushing for change amid a nurse shortage.
While making rounds on sick patients as the physician in my busy hospital, I received an alert on my pager from the nurses that the 76-year-old grandfather we were treating for heart failure had a low blood pressure. A minute later, a “code blue” was called. By the time I arrived in the room, the nursing staff was performing CPR, applying a defibrillator and getting all the necessary medications for a cardiac arrest ready.
This very kind, former carpenter had what could have been a fatal arrhythmia, but due to the nurses’ prompt recognition of a life-threatening condition, he survived.
I call out these nurses’ heroism in their job because recently, President Donald Trump’s Department of Education has designated degrees of nursing ‒ along with physician assistants, nurse practitioners and other medical personnel ‒ as no longer “professional” degrees. In the eyes of the government, the same nurses who saved my patient’s life are no longer professionals.
America has a shortage of health care workers. We need more RNs.
At a time when we are having shortages of clinicians throughout the country to care for vulnerable patients, this reclassification of degrees can have dire consequences.
Most prominently, this impacts the ability of students in these professions to get certain government loans. Included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the redesignation could significantly lower federal loan caps compared with those designated as professional degrees. It may also possibly limit loan forgiveness eligibility.
For those pursuing a career in helping our sick and vulnerable, these programs can be expensive (which is a whole other discussion). We should be making it easier to pursue these noble professions rather than driving students away with the possibility of crushing student loan debt.
Nurses are heroes, Trump officials are charlatans
There are some estimates that there will be a shortage of more than 1 million nurses by 2030 in America.
Not only that, but there also is a dearth of mental health clinicians, at a time when fewer than half of those suffering from mental illness have timely access to care.
Nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants are important clinician partners with physicians in addressing these access gaps and providing important medical and mental health care to those in need.
How the government approaches fiscal policies for professions shows its priorities. Between unclear messaging on Affordable Care Act subsidy extensions, making cuts to Medicaid that significantly affect rural hospitals and now redesignating professional degrees for needed medical personnel, it is clear that making health care more accessible for the public is not a high priority for this administration.
And we haven’t even mentioned the attacks on public health, vaccines and sound science that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has implemented as the head of the Health and Human Services Department.
The health of our nation and our citizens is under threat with this administration and its Republican enablers in control. The folks who should be recognized as professionals and hailed as the heroes that they are – our nurses, physician assistants, mental health workers and other health care workers – are being denigrated by the loss of their professional status.
But the only ones being unprofessional are the charlatans at the Department of Education and in the Trump administration who made these decisions.
Dr. Thomas K. Lew is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and an attending physician of hospital medicine at Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley. All expressed opinions are his own. Follow him on X: @ThomasLewMD
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