Terrible billionaire-in-charge of education Betsy DeVos has stopped canceling the student loan debt of people who were defrauded by failed “for-profit” schools. That’s one of the findings from the Department of Education’s inspector general report. Reuters reports:
According to a report by the inspector general, DeVos also brought the existing cancellation process to a crawl.
Since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, the department has received 25,991 claims for discharging loans. It has denied two requests and approved none, the inspector general, an independent auditor within the agency, found.
You have read that right: None. And as with the rest of the Republican government, DeVos’ job is to be terrible at her job.
The inspector general also found the department did not have a sufficient information system and had to manually retrieve claims data.
“Hundreds of thousands of students were defrauded and cheated by predatory colleges that broke the law, but today’s report confirms Secretary DeVos tried to shirk her responsibility to these students and shut down the borrower-defense program, leaving them with nowhere to turn,” said Senator Patty Murray, the senior Democrat on the Education Committee.
To put that into perspective, Obama’s Department of Education received almost twice as many claims and approved almost 28,000 of them. Of course, this is what happens when you appoint someone from the predatory loan business to oversee the abuses of the predatory loan system.