Student debt collectors say they won’t charge distressed borrowers expensive fees, despite permission from the Trump administration to do just that.

Under a recent guidance change by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, those borrowers are vulnerable to major penalties if they default on privately held, government-backed student loans. After an outcry ensued from consumer groups and Democratic lawmakers who said the fees were unnecessarily punitive, the loan firms spoke out, in turn sparing as many as 11 million debtors who owe a combined $231.4 billion, according to federal data.

All 26 loan companies that serve as middlemen for the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program announced over the past several days that they will not automatically charge the default fee equivalent to 16 percent of the total balance owed. As long as a troubled debtor agrees to make good on their debt in two months or less, and keeps that promise, they won’t have to pay the penalty. That grace period, mandated by the Obama administration, was eliminated by DeVos.

In a March 16 memorandum, she rescinded the earlier directive banning the companies (known as guaranty agencies) from charging the fees before a borrower has had a chance to pony up. For years, guaranty agencies regularly assessed the penalties even when borrowers agreed within 60 days to make good on their bad debt. In July 2015, the Obama administration declared those early fees illegal.

The prohibition prompted a lawsuit by United Student Aid Funds Inc., the nation’s largest guaranty agency, which alone had levied as much as $119 million in such penalties between 2007 and 2015. The company, then led by Bill Hansen, a former Deputy Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush, argued the Obama administration unfairly changed longstanding federal policy. The legal battle continued until this month, when DeVos’s department put the matter to rest with the new guidance. The next day, one of her top deputies, Taylor Hansen, the son of Bill Hansen, resigned from his job at the Education Department. He had joined the department a few weeks earlier.

DeVos’s move sparked outrage from Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Senate Democrat, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. They said the fees posed a hardship on already distressed Americans.

“Unnecessarily adding to Americans’ student loan burden is no way to help struggling families or the U.S. economy,” Durbin said. DeVos spokesman Matthew Frendewey declined to comment on the loan companies’ decision.

Following the backlash, the new owner of United Student Aid Funds, Great Lakes Higher Education Corp., announced it wouldn’t charge the fee. A few days later, Texas Guaranteed Student Loan Corp. made a similar announcement. So did James Bergeron, president of the National Council of Higher Education Resources, on behalf of all other guaranty agencies.

“Many student loan borrowers already have a difficult time managing their loan obligations,” said James Patterson, chief executive of the Texas guaranty agency. “Adding more fees does not help their situation.”

This article was provided by Bloomberg News.