WASHINGTON, June 14 -- For roughly seven and a half million student-loan borrowers, the reckoning that has been deferred for nearly a year arrives on July 1. They are still enrolled in the SAVE plan, the income-driven program that lowered their monthly payments, even though the plan is legally dead. Their balances have been quietly swelling with interest since last summer. And in a matter of weeks the Trump administration will start the clock on a ninety-day deadline to move into costlier repayment plans, funneling millions of people through a system that is already buried under its own backlog. The pain was not inevitable. It is the product of choices made about how to wind the program down.

The basic timeline is now set. As CBS News re...