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California, other states sue over new Trump limits on loans for nurses, PAs, therapists

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California and a coalition of other Democratic-led states are suing the Trump administration over new limits on federal borrowing by aspiring nurses, physician’s assistants, therapists, social workers, mental health practitioners and other healthcare workers, arguing the changes will further reduce a struggling but vital workforce.

“This case is about protecting access to education, protecting our healthcare workforce, and protecting patients who rely on these providers every single day,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said during a virtual news conference Tuesday. “The Trump administration is going out of its way to make it harder and more expensive for students to pursue the advanced degrees necessary to serve their communities and pursue meaningful careers that allow them to support themselves and their families.”

Bonta said the new limits on loans sought by nursing and other healthcare students — which the U.S. Department of Education initiated in response to Republicans passing broader student loan caps as part of last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — was an illegal overreach by the agency that was “deeply shortsighted” and went beyond the scope of the legislation.

“Congress can act,” he said. “But what the Department of Education can’t do is — contrary to law and in an arbitrary and capricious way and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act — redefine what a professional student is.”

In response to the litigation, Trump administration officials defended the new rules, saying they will help student borrowers in the long run by driving down schooling costs at universities nationwide and preventing them from taking on too much debt.

“After decades of unchecked student loan borrowing that gave schools no reason to control costs, these commonsense loan caps — created by Congress — are already incentivizing colleges and universities to lower tuition,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a statement to The Times.

Kent said Bonta and his fellow Democratic litigants “are more concerned about institutions’ bottom-line [than] American students and families’ ability to access affordable postsecondary education.” As one example of institutions responding to loan caps by lowering costs, Kent pointed to UC Irvine reducing the costs of its master’s in business programs by up to 38% to keep them below a federal loan cap for such programs.

The One Big Beautiful Bill, passed by Congress in July 2025, placed new limits on student loans, which could previously be sought for the full cost of such degrees. Starting this July, applicants categorized as “graduate students” will be capped at borrowing $20,500 per year and $100,000 in total, while applicants categorized as “professional students” will be allowed to borrow up to $50,000 annually and $200,000 in total.

On May 1, the U.S. Department of Education issued a new rule defining the “professional student” category as including those pursuing degrees to become doctors, pharmacists, dentists, veterinarians, lawyers, various medical specialists, pastors and other religious academics, and excluding those pursuing nursing and other advanced healthcare degrees.

In announcing the change, Kent said it would “simplify our complex student loan repayment system and better align higher education with workforce needs,” “drive a sea change in higher education by holding universities accountable for outcomes and putting significant downward pressure on the cost of tuition,” and “benefit borrowers who will no longer be pushed into insurmountable debt to finance degrees that do not pay off.”

Others fiercely disagreed, including healthcare industry leaders who also had objected to the rule change during a public comment period. Some said the changes would simply increase student reliance on less favorable, private-sector loans.

The American Assn. of Colleges of Nursing, in a statement, said it and its members were “angered by the Department of Education’s failure to support the nursing profession as the demand for patient care services rises.”

Nearly 150 members of Congress — including more than a dozen Republicans — wrote a letter the day after the rule was promulgated expressing “disappointment” over the exclusion of post-baccalaureate nursing degrees.

“At a time when our nation is facing a health care shortage, especially in primary care, now is not the time to cut off the student pipeline to these programs,” the lawmakers argued.

Rachel Zaentz, a spokesperson for the University of California, which is not party to the lawsuit but operates a vast network of public health programs, said in a statement Tuesday that UC “strongly opposed” the administration’s new caps on federal loans for nurses and other health professionals, which she said “will be felt most strongly by lower-income graduate students.”

“UC will continue to do all we can to ensure that cost is not a barrier for anyone who wants to pursue higher education, and we will continue to advocate with our federal partners for the programs and policies that make this possible,” Zaentz said.

Bonta rejected the administration’s argument that the new caps would help students pursuing a dream of a medical career avoid taking on too much debt — calling it “tone deaf.” He said those students are already “struggling with all costs right now” thanks to the Trump administration’s tariffs, war in Iran and lax approach to regulating monopolies and other big business.

He also rejected the idea that the new loan caps would force institutions to reduce costs for students, calling that “wishful thinking.”

The lawsuit is the 68th filed by Bonta’s office against the second Trump administration. Joining Bonta in the lawsuit — which was filed in the U.S. District Court in Maryland — were the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

Times staff writer Jaweed Kaleem contributed to this report.

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A Wandering Black Hole Meets a Wandering Star

UNC Chapel Hill Astronomers Detect One of the Universes Rarest Black 20260729 010606

What happens when a black hole and a star meet in the middle of nowhere in a galaxy? It sounds like it could be a dramatic science fiction backdrop, with some hapless starship caught in the crunch. Actually, such encounters in real life are pretty rare. They happen maybe once every 100,000 years. But when they do occur, the immense gravity of the supermassive black hole tears the star apart. It’s an eerie-looking process. The star gets “spaghettified” — that is, pulled on one side by the black hole. That rips out a stream of gas from the star, which eventually loops around in a disk around the black hole as the star’s orbit spirals into the black hole.

A computer graphics simulation of a star being disrupted by the gravitational pull of a nearby supermassive black hole. This part of a tidal disruption event emits radiation that can be detected and reveal the presence of the black hole. Courtesy Danielhamesprice CC BY-SA 4.0

As the material in the disk gets heated by friction in the magnetic field, it starts to glow in visible and other forms of light. Eventually, a jet forms, sending a stream of superheated material away from the site of the event. The glow is what allows astronomers to witness the action, called a “tidal disruption event” (TDE).

About a hundred or so TDEs have been observed optically (i.e., in visible light) since the late 20th century. They’ve also been detected with X-ray, infrared, and radio instruments, which gives astronomers an idea of how powerful the action is when they occur. Usually TDEs happen in the cores of galaxies, where the central supermassive black holes exist surrounded by orbiting stars and gas clouds. But there’s nothing that says they all occur there. Some happen well away from the core, or “off-nuclear” as the astronomers like to say.

Observing a Recent TDE

A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill recently used the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) to watch a flaring event called TDE 2025abcr. They identified it as a possible TDE using an AI classification program adapted to search for TDEs away from galactic cores, according to team member Akash Anumarlapudi. “By removing the assumption that these events only happen in the galactic center, we were able to find a black hole that might have otherwise been missed,” explained Anumarlapudi. Once the AI identified a candidate, the team then turned to SOAR to do optical observations.

TDE 2025abcr was the first optical TDE discovered on the outskirts of a host galaxy. It’s not only nowhere near the core of its home galaxy, but the event occurred some 30,000 light-years away. For reference, our Sun lies some 26,000 light-years away from the core of the Milky Way, and we’re out in a spiral arm, not near the core. According to study leader Jonathan Carney, a PhD student in astrophysics at Chapel Hill, TDE 2025abcr turns out to be the most offset such event ever seen.

“Almost every tidal disruption event we’ve ever observed has occurred at the center of a galaxy, right where we expect the biggest black holes to be,” Carney said. “The tidal disruption event we discovered happened tens of thousands of light-years away from the center, revealing a massive black hole in a place we would not normally expect to find one. We know that wandering black holes exist in massive galaxies, but they are difficult to study because, with the exception of when they briefly disrupt a star, they produce no light.”

A Hubble Space Telescope optical image of the TDE Swift J1644+57. It sported a relativistic jet that flowed away from the TDE for about a year and a half. Courtesy NASA/ESA/STScI

Learning About the Black Hole

For a black hole to disrupt a star like this, it has to be quite massive. The team estimates this one is probably about a million times the mass of the Sun. It’s pretty rare to have such a monster just wandering around in space like this one does. So, that raises questions about how it got to where it was when it encountered the hapless star. It’s possible that the black hole was part of a galaxy collision in the distant past. During that event, it could have been kicked out from the center of one of the participating galaxies. Or, it could have been one of several black holes at the core of a galaxy and gotten nudged out of place through interactions with one or more of the others.

Observations of this event show that astronomers have a way to spot wandering black holes away from the cores of their galaxies. Normally, black holes don’t give off much, if any, radiation or other clues to pinpoint their locations. But if one tangles with a star that gets too close, the resulting electromagnetic radiation from the collision gives away the black hole’s location. TDE 2025abcr’s discovery is a template for how astronomers can do visible-light observations of other such black hole entanglements from Earth. That means they’ll be able to discover and study hundreds of thousands of TDEs per year ranging out to great distances from the Milky Way. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, for example, could be a major contender in the hunt for black holes that tangle with nearby stars.

Ongoing TDE studies with Rubin and other observatories can also reveal more information about the life cycles of the stars that get swept up into a TDE event. TDEs also release enormous amounts of energy, and that can help astronomers study gravitational forces and matter that occur under conditions that cannot be studied in the lab.

For More Information

UNC-Chapel Hill Astronomers Detect One of the Universe’s Rarest Black Hole Events

TDE 2025abcr: A Tidal Disruption Event in the Outskirts of a Massive Galaxy

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Magnitude 4.2 earthquake rattles Northern California

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A magnitude 4.2 earthquake was reported Tuesday at 7:40 p.m., eight miles from Healdsburg, Calif., according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

According to the agency, the epicenter was about five miles east-southeast of Cloverdale, around 19 miles from Clearlake and 22 miles from Santa Rosa. The quake occurred at a depth of 3.4 miles.

It caused light to moderate shaking at an intensity expected to cause, at most, very light damage, according to the USGS.

Quakebot, a computer application that monitors the latest earthquakes detected by the USGS, contributed to this report. A Times editor reviewed the post before it was published. If you’re interested in learning more about the system, visit our list of frequently asked questions.

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