As of mid-2018, her department had approved only 16,000 claims, and Education Department officials confirmed that about 15,000 of those were granted partial forgiveness. Tens of thousands more still await a decision.

“There’s nothing in the regulations to stop the secretary from slow-walking the processing of claims,” said Clare McCann, a senior policy adviser at the department during the Obama administration. “I’m positive there will be more litigation from borrowers who have been sitting in the backlog.”

Under President Barack Obama, the Education Department approved claims involving three schools. In nearly two years, the Trump administration has not granted approvals to students from any additional schools, even failed institutions like the Minnesota School of Business, which shut down after a state court ruled that it had misled students and broken state fraud laws.

The department’s attempts to reduce the amount of forgiven debt and block a new forgiveness rule have drawn rebukes from federal judges.

A judge in California found that the department had illegally obtained data from the Social Security Administration on the earnings of former Corinthian Colleges students as it sought to offer some of them only partial loan relief. Last month, the judge granted class-action status to 110,000 former Corinthian students who have applied to have their loans forgiven and may have been granted partial relief.

Also last month, a federal judge in Washington told the department to institute a rule written by the Obama administration requiring a “clear, fair and transparent” process for handling borrowers’ loan discharge requests. The rule also orders the department to automatically forgive the loans of certain students who were enrolled when their schools closed or who withdrew shortly before then, without requiring borrowers to apply for that relief.