There are more than 45 million people with student loans, and many more who are gearing up to go to college at a time when tuition is at record highs: The average annual cost of a private university hit nearly $60,000 in 2024.

The next president will have the power to either ease that financial burden or aggravate it. And while Donald Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail has not included a lot of clarity on his policy plans, his public statements, along with the actions of his previous administration, set out a roadmap for the many ways he will try to gut the affordability of higher education for future students—while sinking those who already have student debt into a deeper financial hole.

What’s more, the agenda authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a future Republican administration, known as Project 2025, also offers a blueprint. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but because it was written by some of his closest allies, it is likely that, should Trump win in November, pieces of the project will become policy priorities.

Here’s what a second Trump term could mean for student debt:

Defunding and closing the Education Department could decimate college affordability for low-income students: At a rally in Wisconsin last month, Donald Trump said that he wants to shut down the Department of Education should he return to the Oval Office. “I’m dying to get back to do this,” he said. “We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education.” 

As president, Trump proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!”

Trump couldn’t close the Education Department singlehandledly: it would require an act of Congress. But defunding the department would have far-reaching implications for education funding. A key one: The department administers $39 billion of Pell Grants, scholarships awarded to students from low-income backgrounds. About half of Pell Grants go to students whose families earn less than $20,000 per year. Without the department, it’s unclear who would distribute and oversee Pell Grants; if they’re thrown into chaos, low-income students will have little choice but to take on additional student loans. Trump has shown a willingness to compromise this crucial source of financial aid in the past: During his presidency, he proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half of that to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!” Trump tweeted at the time.

Ending Public Service Loan Forgiveness: Signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, the PSLF program promises to cancel the remaining debt for public servants, from police offices and prosecutors to public defenders, who have made 10 years of payments on their loans. In the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has awarded $74 billion in student debt relief to public servants who’ve met PSLF’s payment requirements.

But when the first wave of borrowers qualified for relief in 2017, Trump’s Education Department rejected 99 percent of applicants. His administration then proposed a 2021 budget that would have nixed PSLF entirely. That did not pass, but the goal remains: Project 2025 includes an explicit recommendation to terminate PSLF should there be a Republican president.

Hampering other forms of student debt relief: In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s attempt to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt for low- and middle-income borrowers. Trump called the decision a “massive win” that halted an “unconstitutional student loan gimmick.”

In the wake of this decision by the Supreme Court, the Biden-Harris administration sought to provide relief another way: They launched the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan, an income-driven repayment program that would lower required payments for many borrowers, and forgive the remainder of their debt after somewhere between 10 and 25 years, depending on the original loan balance. Within months, more than a dozen Republican-led states had sued to shut down the program. Those lawsuits are ongoing. And it is safe to say that a Trump-Vance administration would do little to stop them: In June, Trump called Biden’s latest student debt relief efforts “vile,” while Vance has encouraged Republicans to fight student loan cancellation “with every ounce of our energy of power.” Plus, Project 2025 suggests that a future Trump administration should end all existing income-driven debt repayment plans because they are too generous.

Weakening debt relief for borrowers defrauded by for-profit schools: When Betsy DeVos served as Trump’s education secretary, she rewrote an existing department rule that discharges the loans of students who attended fraudulent colleges. Her version shrunk the amount these loans could be canceled, limiting them to just three cents for every dollar spent on their degrees. Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to overturn DeVos’s rule, but Trump vetoed it, leaving her restrictions in place until Biden undid them upon taking office. Should Trump return to the White House, this relief for borrowers would very likely be on the chopping block.

Causing some student loans to accrue more interest: In 2018, the Trump administrations budget proposed ending subsidized Stafford loans, which don’t accrue interest while undergraduate students are in school. This change would lead to thousands of additional dollars of debt for borrowers, many of whom are also from low-income families—about 70 percent of subsidized loan borrowers also qualify for Pell Grants. In 2018, the Center for American Progress estimated that an end to subsidized loans would saddle nearly 6 million students with an additional $2.8 billion in costs each year.

There are more than 45 million people with student loans, and many more who are gearing up to go to college at a time when tuition is at record highs: The average annual cost of a private university hit nearly $60,000 in 2024.

The next president will have the power to either ease that financial burden or aggravate it. And while Donald Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail has not included a lot of clarity on his policy plans, his public statements, along with the actions of his previous administration, set out a roadmap for the many ways he will try to gut the affordability of higher education for future students—while sinking those who already have student debt into a deeper financial hole.

What’s more, the agenda authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a future Republican administration, known as Project 2025, also offers a blueprint. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but because it was written by some of his closest allies, it is likely that, should Trump win in November, pieces of the project will become policy priorities.

Here’s what a second Trump term could mean for student debt:

Defunding and closing the Education Department could decimate college affordability for low-income students: At a rally in Wisconsin last month, Donald Trump said that he wants to shut down the Department of Education should he return to the Oval Office. “I’m dying to get back to do this,” he said. “We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education.” 

As president, Trump proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!”

Trump couldn’t close the Education Department singlehandledly: it would require an act of Congress. But defunding the department would have far-reaching implications for education funding. A key one: The department administers $39 billion of Pell Grants, scholarships awarded to students from low-income backgrounds. About half of Pell Grants go to students whose families earn less than $20,000 per year. Without the department, it’s unclear who would distribute and oversee Pell Grants; if they’re thrown into chaos, low-income students will have little choice but to take on additional student loans. Trump has shown a willingness to compromise this crucial source of financial aid in the past: During his presidency, he proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half of that to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!” Trump tweeted at the time.

Ending Public Service Loan Forgiveness: Signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, the PSLF program promises to cancel the remaining debt for public servants, from police offices and prosecutors to public defenders, who have made 10 years of payments on their loans. In the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has awarded $74 billion in student debt relief to public servants who’ve met PSLF’s payment requirements.

But when the first wave of borrowers qualified for relief in 2017, Trump’s Education Department rejected 99 percent of applicants. His administration then proposed a 2021 budget that would have nixed PSLF entirely. That did not pass, but the goal remains: Project 2025 includes an explicit recommendation to terminate PSLF should there be a Republican president.

Hampering other forms of student debt relief: In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s attempt to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt for low- and middle-income borrowers. Trump called the decision a “massive win” that halted an “unconstitutional student loan gimmick.”

In the wake of this decision by the Supreme Court, the Biden-Harris administration sought to provide relief another way: They launched the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan, an income-driven repayment program that would lower required payments for many borrowers, and forgive the remainder of their debt after somewhere between 10 and 25 years, depending on the original loan balance. Within months, more than a dozen Republican-led states had sued to shut down the program. Those lawsuits are ongoing. And it is safe to say that a Trump-Vance administration would do little to stop them: In June, Trump called Biden’s latest student debt relief efforts “vile,” while Vance has encouraged Republicans to fight student loan cancellation “with every ounce of our energy of power.” Plus, Project 2025 suggests that a future Trump administration should end all existing income-driven debt repayment plans because they are too generous.

Weakening debt relief for borrowers defrauded by for-profit schools: When Betsy DeVos served as Trump’s education secretary, she rewrote an existing department rule that discharges the loans of students who attended fraudulent colleges. Her version shrunk the amount these loans could be canceled, limiting them to just three cents for every dollar spent on their degrees. Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to overturn DeVos’s rule, but Trump vetoed it, leaving her restrictions in place until Biden undid them upon taking office. Should Trump return to the White House, this relief for borrowers would very likely be on the chopping block.

Causing some student loans to accrue more interest: In 2018, the Trump administrations budget proposed ending subsidized Stafford loans, which don’t accrue interest while undergraduate students are in school. This change would lead to thousands of additional dollars of debt for borrowers, many of whom are also from low-income families—about 70 percent of subsidized loan borrowers also qualify for Pell Grants. In 2018, the Center for American Progress estimated that an end to subsidized loans would saddle nearly 6 million students with an additional $2.8 billion in costs each year.

The first thing the neighbors on Newport’s Bellevue Avenue complained about was the helipad.

The 2-mile stretch of Rhode Island coast has long been a playground for America’s billionaires, lined with lavish, historic mansions. But for as long as most could remember, old money had meant an untouchable kind of peace, not the thunderous noise of a chopper. Now the New Yorkers who’d bought 646 Bellevue—a Gilded Age estate known as Miramar—had turned a patch of grass on their 8 acres of oceanfront land into their very own LaGuardia, and folks weren’t happy about it.

“Having Sikorskys land in the neighborhood does seem contextually off, noisy, and potentially unsafe,” one neighbor emailed to another, referring to a brand of helicopter. They didn’t even ask Newport’s zoning board, she’d heard. Her concern, she emphasized, was “the character, livability, and safety of the neighborhood.” This wasn’t about begrudging the mansion’s new owners, Wall Street titan Stephen Schwarzman and his wife, Christine; by all accounts, they were “very nice people.”

Schwarzman, the 77-year-old CEO of private equity giant Blackstone, had purchased Miramar the year before, in the fall of 2021. The mansion, which boasts 44,000 square feet of living space, including 22 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, and a seven-bed, seven-bath guesthouse, was completed in 1915 for a streetcar magnate who later died on the Titanic. Within months of buying Miramar, Schwarzman also acquired the residence next door, Ocean View, which has 15 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, and a six-car garage. Together, they cost $43 million—making Schwarzman’s megaproperty among Newport’s most expensive home purchases ever.

A slice of Schwarzman’s fortune has gone to indulging his famously extravagant tastes. Another chunk has gone to the GOP and Donald Trump.

Schwarzman’s pandemic splurge came just as his firm decided to double down on scooping up rental housing. During the housing crash of the Great Recession, Blackstone had snapped up underwater homes for cheap and eventually made a fortune. The Covid collapse offered Blackstone another bite at the apple. In 2021 and 2022, it bought up 200,000 new units of rental housing at bargain-basement interest rates, adding to a portfolio of more than 150,000 rentals and making Blackstone the nation’s biggest corporate landlord. The firm’s real estate arm is core to its business, worth about $337 billion—about a third of its total investments—and its rental portfolio has seen a healthy return of about $11 billion over the last decade, hiking rent on some of its properties by nearly 80 percent.

A slice of that fortune has gone to indulging Schwarzman’s famously extravagant tastes, such as the $5 million bash he threw in 20o7 to celebrate his 60th birthday, or the roughly $200 million worth of vacation homes he’s purchased in England; Jamaica; Palm Beach, Florida; St. Tropez, France; and the Hamptons in New York. Another chunk has gone to the GOP and Donald Trump. A longtime Republican megadonor, Schwarzman said in 2022 that he’d no longer support the former president, having called the January 6 insurrection “an affront to democratic values.” But when the abstraction of “values” bumped up against the reality of money, money won. Schwarzman is a major donor again this election cycle, giving more than $20 million to Republican candidates—with the GOP’s tax cuts for the superwealthy set to expire less than a year into the next president’s term.

It’s not only the roar of helicopter blades irritating Schwarzman’s neighbors: His massive renovation at Miramar has incensed local residents, not for its opulence—this town is used to the wild construction demands of wealthy out-of-towners—but for its Marie Antoinette level of disregard for the community. And as the drama of his Petit Versailles has irked Schwarzman’s neighbors, it has also offered a window into what happens when he throws his might and fortune behind a goal—be it a Rhode Island palace or a potential president.

Not as scene-y as the Hamptons or as flashy as Palm Beach, Newport is only a three-hour drive from Wall Street and, for a relative bargain, offers extravagant manors situated along hundreds of miles of idyllic coastline. But the city of 24,000 is squeezed into the corner of an island on Narragansett Bay, which means that less-affluent residents living in the nearby North End, including military families on its naval base, couldn’t ignore the rich and powerful if they tried.

“When I go to a barre class, I’ll just see [US Sen. and multimillionaire] Sheldon Whitehouse outside of Le Bec Sucré, you know, standing in line to get his croissant,” says North End resident and Newport Public Schools activist Amy Machado, drawing out the pronunciation: kwaa–SOHN.

Nowhere is the gap between rich and regular more acute than Bellevue Avenue, where the homes that surround Schwarzman’s Miramar are lousy with opulence and the sort of melodrama that only the moneyed set have time for. There’s a replica of a 17th-century chateau built for King Louis XIV and his mistress, along with several of the Vanderbilts’ former summer homes—one made of marble and another a 70-room Italian Renaissance-style palazzo. There is also the mansion once home to an alleged murderer, a billionaire tobacco heiress who almost definitely killed her interior designer. On the southern end of the street, old money gives way to nouveau riche: Oracle’s Larry Ellison, currently the world’s second-richest man, has spent more than $100 million renovating his estate and landscaping the grounds with a maze of shrubs and boulders so ugly it has become something of a local pastime to ridicule it. Nearby is a villa owned by another Wall Street CEO that was once home to a Nazi collaborator’s son who was convicted and later acquitted of twice trying to murder his heiress wife.

Schwarzman is spending at least $7 million to add, among other things, a pool, a tennis court, bronze windows, pergola and lattice pavilions, a fountain, and a guard house.

It’s all gorgeous and gossipy until you start thinking about the source of all this money, a nagging feeling almost as old as the town itself: “There is something in the air that has nothing to do with pleasure and nothing to do with graceful tradition,” Joan Didion wrote of Newport in 1967. “[A] sense not of how prettily money can be spent but of how harshly money is made.”

Schwarzman is, indeed, using harsh money to make pretty things. Specifically, he’s spending at least $7 million to add a pool, a tennis court, two bathrooms, a full guesthouse renovation, bronze windows, pergola and lattice pavilions, a fountain, a guard house, a skylight, a generator, a state-of-the-art geothermal HVAC system, and a modern iteration of the estate’s early 20th-century gardens.

And that would all be fine—normal, even, for the area—if it weren’t for what happened on nearby Yznaga Avenue. A short, leafy dead-end road right off Bellevue, Yznaga leads to Miramar’s service entrance. Schwarzman’s contractors soon lined the street seven days a week with dozens of trucks, from early dawn well into the night—sometimes past midnight.

The single homeowner on Yznaga, Mark Brice, often found himself unable to get out of his driveway. He asked the city for a parking ban that would stop Schwarzman’s crews, and anyone else, from parking on the street and blocking his route. (Brice did not respond to requests for comment.)

Banning parking on a single street may not sound like a big deal. But Yznaga Avenue, named after a 19th-century slave-owning sugar merchant, is one of the only streets where people from less-affluent parts of town can park for free and walk to some of Newport’s most beloved green spaces: Rovensky Park, the Cliff Walk, and “Rejects Beach”—a public beach next to Newport’s most exclusive beach club, Bailey’s.

The street has been a local battleground for years, with some wealthy neighbors insisting it is private, even going so far as to put up “No Parking” signs. (Newport’s zoning office confirms that Yznaga has always been city owned.) With Schwarzman’s arrival, the street remained public in theory, but in practice, it had become his construction staging area, with little room for Newporters to park and regular blockades for the one unlucky neighbor. 

“The level of construction that is happening there is hidden away from view but quite stunning when you see it.”

When Brice’s parking proposal went before the city council last spring, residents were furious that the city was considering a parking ban on Yznaga to solve a problem created by a billionaire. They flooded council members with angry letters: “It is both elitist and selfish to move forward,” one resident wrote. “A thinly disguised effort to enhance the exclusivity of that neighborhood,” opined another. “This has been a benefit forever for residents in an area that is mostly conceded to the uber-rich,” wrote a third person. “There’s a reason the beach there is called Rejects.”

The council held two hearings on the bill. From their dais at City Hall, they marveled at how sprawling the construction was. One council member said he analyzed Google satellite photos of Miramar and the project’s spillover onto Yznaga, and even drove down to the area himself. How bad could it really be? “It’s bad,” he concluded. “It is actually unprecedented. I haven’t seen anything that bad in this city. The level of construction that is happening there is hidden away from view but quite stunning when you see it.”

The council member whose district includes Bellevue agreed. “There is an unfathomable amount of construction,” he told his colleagues. His constituents had taken to sending him videos of the construction vehicles “entering up and down and up and down” Yznaga as early as 4:30 a.m.

Every local who testified spoke against the ban, except Brice, the homeowner on Yznaga. For council members, the central question became how to balance public beach access against the needs of a man who couldn’t exit the driveway of his $5 million house. But no one seemed to consider, out loud at least, addressing the root of the problem: the man with the $43 million property who messed up the street in the first place.

Eventually, the council voted for a full ban, contrary to the advice of the fire chief and traffic department, both of which recommended prohibiting parking on just one side of the street. So, by inconveniencing his neighbor, Schwarzman got a private driveway where his workers never have to compete for a spot. When I visited in August, I saw six trucks parked bumper to bumper, in violation of the ban. No one from the city seemed to mind.

The fight over Yznaga Avenue, it turned out, was just the tip of the iceberg. About six months after moving in, Schwarzman inquired with the Rhode Island Airport Corp. about registering his Miramar helipad with the Federal Aviation Administration. But Schwarzman abandoned the application, according to the RIAC, and never filed it. That didn’t stop him from having a helicopter land on the property regularly—sometimes multiple times per week. (A Schwarzman spokesperson told Mother Jones that the RIAC’s chief aeronautics inspector visited the site and approved it and that registration is now pending with the FAA. The RIAC told Mother Jones that after the inspector’s visit, no application was ever filed or approved. The FAA also told Mother Jones there is no pending application.)

One neighbor in Schwarzman’s flight path wondered why he sometimes opted to fly low right over the neighborhood instead of the water, which would be less intrusive and easy to do, given that Miramar’s landing pad is next to the ocean. “I thought, ‘This is really annoying,’” the neighbor said. “And why is he flying looking down on everybody? Of course, you couldn’t do that to him.” (Schwarzman’s spokesperson denied that the helicopter’s flight path went over the neighborhood.)

Then, in January 2022, Schwarzman’s team reached out to the city of Newport for permission to dig up a chunk of Bellevue Avenue to install a fiber-optic cable. Internet in the neighborhood is notoriously slow, and according to emails obtained from the city, it appeared they were planning on installing a private line just Schwarzman’s estate could use. Only after a city official intervened did the team notify neighbors of the upcoming construction and install a public line instead.

When a sinkhole suddenly appeared in the Cliff Walk this past April in front of Miramar’s fence, Newporters were pretty sure they knew who had caused it.

In August 2023, a Bellevue resident called the city manager to complain about the relentless construction and noise that never let up, with work and deliveries going on 24/7. The office contacted Newport zoning to ask when the construction was permitted and got a curt email in response—it was far from the first time it had fielded complaints about Miramar. “Yes the hours are 7am-9pm I will call her the owners of 646 seem not to care about anyone but there [sic] construction project,” the official wrote.

And there was more to aggravate neighbors, including drilling for geothermal wells. Workers also dug up the slope that stretches from the mansion to the iconic Cliff Walk, leading piles of soil to tumble onto the pathway.

When a sinkhole suddenly appeared in the Cliff Walk this past April in front of Miramar’s fence, Newporters were pretty sure they knew who had caused it. The scenic bluff overlooking Easton Bay, beloved by locals and tourists, is one of the only places in the world where you can go for a hike surrounded by stunning shoreline views on one side and eye-candy mansions on the other. The city eventually closed a quarter-mile of the walk for repairs—they’d found cracks in a portion of the walk behind Miramar and deterioration in the seawall footers that protect from erosion. The sinkhole’s cause was never confirmed, but a few months later, Schwarzman paid for the entire repair. (Schwarzman’s spokesperson called the implication that construction at Miramar had caused the sinkhole “unfounded,” citing “preexisting natural erosion issues.”)

Maybe it was a tacit apology. Or maybe it was a way for Schwarzman to make nice with his neighbors and Newport’s high society, whom he’d been courting with large donations to local charities, like the $20,000 he gave to a soiree benefiting homeless animals run by a local animal league and the approximately $100,000 he gave to Newport’s powerful preservation society.

In a town where famous titans—the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Dukes—live on forever through palaces constructed in their image, it seems as though Schwarzman is vying to be the next immortal name. In August, he unveiled plans to turn Miramar into a public museum upon his death, saying it would be owned by a foundation and maintained with a special endowment.

Not mentioned in the statement is how the move would benefit Schwarzman himself: Without remotely changing his lifestyle, it will help him uphold the philanthropic promise he made in 2020 by joining the Giving Pledge, a club of billionaires who promise to donate at least half of their wealth to charity. The pledge isn’t binding, and it allows any giving to happen after death. Even better: Turning over the home to a foundation could lower future taxes, as would the museum designation—a common tactic used by the ultrawealthy.

A month before the 2016 election, a leaked Access Hollywood video showed Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” As the presidential candidate’s lurid remarks ricocheted across the airwaves, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, was en route to Miramar, where he was scheduled to headline a campaign fundraiser. (The home was then owned by a different Wall Street tycoon.)

Local GOP leaders issued statements condemning Trump’s words, then walked through Miramar’s stately gates and joined guests to donate more than $500,000. One Republican state representative explained the decision to proceed with the fundraiser despite the national uproar: “If you want to see this revolution happen, you have to get past the man and go with the ideas he represents.”

Schwarzman has done exactly that: Grit his teeth and support the guy he thinks will help his business.

In late 2022, Schwarzman vowed to get behind someone else in the GOP primary. But after more than a dozen candidates fell short, he returned to supporting Trump.

Schwarzman didn’t back Trump initially, but shortly after the 2016 election, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee and later agreed to work with the new president as an economic adviser. That connection opened some lucrative doors: On a trip to meet with Saudi officials with Trump in 2017, Schwarzman’s firm announced a $20 billion commitment from the kingdom for a new investment fund. He also advised Trump on China policy, encouraging the president to soften his anti-China rhetoric, which would benefit Blackstone’s extensive holdings in the country. On the campaign trail, Trump had promised to end “carried interest,” a decades-old tax break for private equity executives. But with Schwarzman on the team, Trump’s campaign promise never materialized. (Last year, Schwarzman earned about $79.5 million in carried interest.)

In late 2022, nearly two years after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and after Trump-backed candidates in several states lost in the midterms, Schwarzman finally decided he wouldn’t back Trump anymore. This wasn’t the revolution he’d signed up for. He called for “a new generation of leaders” and vowed to get behind someone else in the Republican primary.

But after more than a dozen GOP primary candidates fell short, he came back into the fold. In May, with Trump’s Manhattan felony trial in full swing, Schwarzman announced that he would support his bid to defeat Joe Biden.

In August, three weeks after Kamala Harris stepped in as the Democratic nominee, rumors swirled that Schwarzman was set to host a Trump fundraiser at Miramar.

A spokesperson for the billionaire denied there was ever such a plan. But on a warm summer Thursday, Schwarzman did throw a bash at Miramar for about 200 people—the same afternoon that Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, hosted a fundraiser a few blocks down Bellevue. 

Schwarzman’s event featured greeters dressed in 18th-century garb and a carnival setup. Bright structures carved to look like castle spires dotted the grounds and guests wandered among them, prohibited from walking through most of the actual palace, which, by now, Schwarzman’s decorators had adorned with a bounty of impressionist paintings and antique French furniture, including a desk that once stood at Versailles. Men in straw boat hats and suspenders ferried attendees to and from nearby parking in golf carts.

Walz, meanwhile, went to Ochre Court, a mansion owned by a local Catholic university, Salve Regina. His event had little of Miramar’s pomp: no costumed greeters, no pinstriped chauffeurs, no carnival set. Walz spoke for 17 minutes in the three-story atrium, then sped off to his next event in the Hamptons.

By fundraising metrics, the Walz event was a success, raising $650,000. Politically, it stirred up a minor controversy. Nearly half of Rhode Islanders are Catholic, and many, including the state’s powerful diocese, bristled at a Catholic venue hosting a campaign that vocally supports abortion rights.

As it turned out, the Walz event organizers had sought out a different space, Belcourt—the third-largest Bellevue mansion. But it wasn’t available. Not because there was an event happening at the 60-room chateau, but because Schwarzman had rented it. He needed a place to store construction equipment during his yard party—and given the dearth of public parking, he would need a spillover lot.

In front of a packed room at a Senate hearing on Thursday, longtime nurse Ellen MacInnis recounted working at a Massachusetts hospital owned by Steward Health Care, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital provider. Her voice broke as she remembered the many times she and her colleagues couldn’t give their patients the very best care because Steward insisted on saving money: by laying off staff, cutting resources, and leaving medical supply bills unpaid.

During one shift, MacInnis remembered, there were 95 patients in the emergency room and only 11 nurses; that day, she said, an elderly man awaiting chemotherapy treatment suddenly died in the ER. Another day, a patient in mental health crisis arrived in the emergency room. Without enough staff, they couldn’t allocate someone to watch him continuously, as is standard procedure. That patient went into distress and died.

The veteran nurse told this story in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), which held a charged hearing on the abuses of Steward and its investor owners. In response to testimony from MacInnis and others about the abysmal patient treatment they witnessed thanks to Steward’s extractive business model, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle assailed the company and promised to work on legislation to prevent Wall Street firms from looting hospital systems, amid a growing trend of private equity investment in health care.

“The collapse of Steward Health Care is just one extreme example of the damaging role that private equity is having, in my view, on our health care system.”

“Private equity firms have bought up hundreds of hospitals, thousands of nursings homes, and tens of thousands of medical practices,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in kicking off the hearing. “The collapse of Steward Health Care is just one extreme example of the damaging role that private equity is having, in my view, on our health care system.”

Steward declared bankruptcy in May, and has come under fire this year as details have emerged about the many ways the company prioritized enriching its top brass and investors at the expense of patient care, eventually running the chain into financial ruin. The company, which operates hospitals in eight states, was formed when private equity firm Cerberus bought a Massachusetts Catholic hospital chain in 2010, and is now owned by a publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT) called Medical Properties Trust.

A recent Boston Globe investigation revealed that Steward’s disinvestment in patient care led to at least 15 deaths over the past 14 years. At the same time, top executives at Steward earned enormous sums while cutting costs at their hospitals, placing strain on health care providers trying to do their jobs and leading to subpar care for patients. In particular, Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre—who bought a $40 million yacht and a $15 million luxury fishing boat, uses two private jets Steward purchased for a combined $95 million, and who received a $100 million dividend when he engineered the sale of Steward to MPT—has drawn sharp criticism from the likes of Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

De la Torre was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate HELP Committee in July. About a week ago, his attorneys informed the committee that he was planning to defy the subpoena. On Thursday, committee members announced they would file resolutions to hold de la Torre in contempt for refusing to show. If he is prosecuted and convicted of criminal contempt, de la Torre could face a fine of up to $100,000 and jail time.

“The corporatization and commodification of hospital care has led to horrific harm and suffering to our patients.”

At Thursday’s hearing, nurse Audra Sprague recounted how the beds at her hospital would not be repaired when they broke. Staff then rented beds to fill in the gap. But Steward stopped paying the rental bed vendor, forcing Sprague and her colleagues to transfer patients to other hospitals because they didn’t have a physical place for them to lie. Her hospital, which served a rural population in central Massachusetts, closed abruptly last month due to Steward’s bankruptcy. It was licensed for 57 beds, but Sprague said that by the time it closed there were only 18 working ones left.

MacInnis added that Steward’s habit of understaffing their hospitals, as well as failing to pay many vendors, led to preventable patient harm and death. “The immediate and most debilitating impact of the ownership of Steward was Steward’s tendency to understaff units whenever and wherever they can,” she said. “The corporatization and commodification of hospital care has led to horrific harm and suffering to our patients.”

Throughout the hearing, lawmakers asked witnesses what sort of regulation they believed would help prevent more Stewards in the future. The mayor of West Monroe, Louisiana, Staci Mitchell, agreed that greater transparency into the opaque actions and finances of private equity and REIT hospital owners could have helped prevent some of the harms that unfolded at the Steward hospital in her community, Glenwood Medical Center, which included a major reduction in emergency services, layoffs of hundreds of medical staff, and strain on small businesses in the community who were owed tens of thousands by Steward for work.

After the hearing, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) held a press conference where he shed further light on lawmakers’ plans to try to regulate private equity purchases of hospitals with the Health Over Wealth Act. Introduced this summer, the bill would require that private equity–owned health care providers publicly report their debt, executive pay, health care costs charged to patients, and any reductions in services to patients or to staff pay—the kind of transparency that might help spot the sort of drastic cost-cutting that Steward Health Care engaged in for years.

The bill “will ensure transparency, accountability, protections for patients and providers, and guarantee access to care for every community in the country,” Markey said in a statement. “I am committed to preventing Steward’s failures from becoming America’s health care standard.”

In front of a packed room at a Senate hearing on Thursday, longtime nurse Ellen MacInnis recounted working at a Massachusetts hospital owned by Steward Health Care, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital provider. Her voice broke as she remembered the many times she and her colleagues couldn’t give their patients the very best care because Steward insisted on saving money: by laying off staff, cutting resources, and leaving medical supply bills unpaid.

During one shift, MacInnis remembered, there were 95 patients in the emergency room and only 11 nurses; that day, she said, an elderly man awaiting chemotherapy treatment suddenly died in the ER. Another day, a patient in mental health crisis arrived in the emergency room. Without enough staff, they couldn’t allocate someone to watch him continuously, as is standard procedure. That patient went into distress and died.

The veteran nurse told this story in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), which held a charged hearing on the abuses of Steward and its investor owners. In response to testimony from MacInnis and others about the abysmal patient treatment they witnessed thanks to Steward’s extractive business model, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle assailed the company and promised to work on legislation to prevent Wall Street firms from looting hospital systems, amid a growing trend of private equity investment in health care.

“The collapse of Steward Health Care is just one extreme example of the damaging role that private equity is having, in my view, on our health care system.”

“Private equity firms have bought up hundreds of hospitals, thousands of nursings homes, and tens of thousands of medical practices,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in kicking off the hearing. “The collapse of Steward Health Care is just one extreme example of the damaging role that private equity is having, in my view, on our health care system.”

Steward declared bankruptcy in May, and has come under fire this year as details have emerged about the many ways the company prioritized enriching its top brass and investors at the expense of patient care, eventually running the chain into financial ruin. The company, which operates hospitals in eight states, was formed when private equity firm Cerberus bought a Massachusetts Catholic hospital chain in 2010, and is now owned by a publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT) called Medical Properties Trust.

A recent Boston Globe investigation revealed that Steward’s disinvestment in patient care led to at least 15 deaths over the past 14 years. At the same time, top executives at Steward earned enormous sums while cutting costs at their hospitals, placing strain on health care providers trying to do their jobs and leading to subpar care for patients. In particular, Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre—who bought a $40 million yacht and a $15 million luxury fishing boat, uses two private jets Steward purchased for a combined $95 million, and who received a $100 million dividend when he engineered the sale of Steward to MPT—has drawn sharp criticism from the likes of Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

De la Torre was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate HELP Committee in July. About a week ago, his attorneys informed the committee that he was planning to defy the subpoena. On Thursday, committee members announced they would file resolutions to hold de la Torre in contempt for refusing to show. If he is prosecuted and convicted of criminal contempt, de la Torre could face a fine of up to $100,000 and jail time.

“The corporatization and commodification of hospital care has led to horrific harm and suffering to our patients.”

At Thursday’s hearing, nurse Audra Sprague recounted how the beds at her hospital would not be repaired when they broke. Staff then rented beds to fill in the gap. But Steward stopped paying the rental bed vendor, forcing Sprague and her colleagues to transfer patients to other hospitals because they didn’t have a physical place for them to lie. Her hospital, which served a rural population in central Massachusetts, closed abruptly last month due to Steward’s bankruptcy. It was licensed for 57 beds, but Sprague said that by the time it closed there were only 18 working ones left.

MacInnis added that Steward’s habit of understaffing their hospitals, as well as failing to pay many vendors, led to preventable patient harm and death. “The immediate and most debilitating impact of the ownership of Steward was Steward’s tendency to understaff units whenever and wherever they can,” she said. “The corporatization and commodification of hospital care has led to horrific harm and suffering to our patients.”

Throughout the hearing, lawmakers asked witnesses what sort of regulation they believed would help prevent more Stewards in the future. The mayor of West Monroe, Louisiana, Staci Mitchell, agreed that greater transparency into the opaque actions and finances of private equity and REIT hospital owners could have helped prevent some of the harms that unfolded at the Steward hospital in her community, Glenwood Medical Center, which included a major reduction in emergency services, layoffs of hundreds of medical staff, and strain on small businesses in the community who were owed tens of thousands by Steward for work.

After the hearing, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) held a press conference where he shed further light on lawmakers’ plans to try to regulate private equity purchases of hospitals with the Health Over Wealth Act. Introduced this summer, the bill would require that private equity–owned health care providers publicly report their debt, executive pay, health care costs charged to patients, and any reductions in services to patients or to staff pay—the kind of transparency that might help spot the sort of drastic cost-cutting that Steward Health Care engaged in for years.

The bill “will ensure transparency, accountability, protections for patients and providers, and guarantee access to care for every community in the country,” Markey said in a statement. “I am committed to preventing Steward’s failures from becoming America’s health care standard.”