What specific policy or executive order removed nursing from a list of 'professional' jobs under Trump?
Executive summary
The change that removed nursing from the Education Department’s list of “professional” programs came as part of implementing President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and the department’s revised regulatory definition of “professional degree” tied to new graduate-loan caps; the Education Department excluded nursing and several other health and education fields in its updated classification [1] [2] [3]. The policy shift follows Congress’s statutory overhaul in OBBBA (Section 81001 eliminated the old Grad PLUS program and set new caps) and the Education Department used its regulatory authority during negotiated rulemaking to define which programs qualify as “professional” for the new loan limits [1] [4].
1. What precisely changed: law versus implementation
Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which eliminated the longstanding Grad PLUS loan program for graduate and professional students and set new borrowing caps (Section 81001) — that statutory change created the need to specify which graduate programs count as “professional” and therefore qualify for higher loan limits [1] [5]. The Department of Education then implemented a new, narrower regulatory definition in its negotiated rulemaking and published a revised list of programs that would be treated as “professional,” explicitly excluding nursing and several allied-health and education fields [4] [3].
2. Who acted: Congress or the Department of Education?
The statutory authority came from Congress via OBBBA, which changed the federal graduate-student loan framework and required program classifications to determine loan caps [1]. The practical removal of nursing from the “professional” category was effected by the Department of Education through its updated rulemaking and guidance that interprets the law — the department’s negotiated-rulemaking sessions and subsequent rule language are what reclassified nursing for loan-eligibility purposes [4] [6].
3. The mechanism: negotiated rulemaking and regulatory definition
Reporting indicates the Department of Education used negotiated rulemaking and a revised regulatory definition (34 CFR and related guidance) to narrow “professional degree” to a short list of fields — medicine, law, dentistry and similar historically listed programs — and to exclude nursing, physician assistant, physical therapy, public health and other graduate programs from that list [4] [3]. That regulatory redefinition ties directly back to how much students in those programs can borrow under the new statutory caps [1] [7].
4. Immediate practical effect: loan caps and student impact
Under the new law and department interpretation, “professional degree” students can borrow at the higher annual and lifetime limits (Newsweek and others cite $50,000 annual with a $200,000 lifetime cap under the OBBBA implementation), while students in excluded graduate programs face lower caps — generating concern because many advanced nursing degrees (MSN, DNP) are now subject to the stricter limits [1] [8]. Media and nursing associations warn this will affect hundreds of thousands of students and could force more dependence on private loans or reduce graduate enrollment [7] [8].
5. Conflicting perspectives and institutional reactions
The Department of Education has described some online claims as myths, arguing the changes are technical adjustments to align definitions with statute (reported rebuttals noted in coverage), while nursing groups including the American Nurses Association and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing say the exclusion threatens workforce pipelines and patient care and have urged reconsideration [9] [2]. Conservative analysts cited by business outlets argue the department has discretion to limit the “professional” label and that caps primarily target programs with very high tuition [7].
6. What reporting does and does not say
Available sources uniformly tie the removal of nursing from the “professional” list to the combination of the OBBBA’s statutory changes and the Education Department’s rulemaking [1] [4]. Sources do not provide a single, named executive order that by itself removed nursing from the list; instead, the change arose from Congressional statute plus Education Department regulatory action and negotiated-rulemaking (not found in current reporting). Snopes, Newsweek, Washington Post, WPR and others document both the law and the department’s implementation and the subsequent outcry from nursing organizations [1] [8] [6] [3].
7. Why this matters politically and administratively
This is a hybrid policy shift: Congress rewrote the loan framework, and the Education Department exercised interpretive authority over program classification — a typical administrative response that nonetheless has large distributive effects. Nursing advocates frame the department’s classification as a political choice with workforce consequences; the department and some commentators frame it as a technical alignment with new statutory language and a way to constrain graduate borrowing [5] [7].
Limitations: reporting in the provided sources focuses on the OBBBA statute and the Education Department’s negotiated-rulemaking; sources do not identify a standalone executive order that removed nursing from the “professional” list (not found in current reporting).