A federal judge had to tell Betsy DeVos and her Education Department to forgive loans of students defrauded by for-profit colleges—and even after that court loss, DeVos’ department is blocking help for more than 150,000 fraud victims. The judge’s order came back in October, telling the Trump administration to enforce an Obama administration rule offering relief to people struggling to pay student loans they obtained on the basis of fraudulent recruitment tactics. But, the New York Times reports, the Education Department simply … isn’t doing it.
According to a department spokeswoman, “Pending litigation has slowed down the department’s processing to provide relief to additional borrowers,” and it would be adding capacity to process more applications soon. Which is interesting, since the number of applications either approved or denied from June to December of 2018 was zero, suggesting that the problem is not so much capacity as willingness.
In one year, the Obama administration approved relief for 30,000 students. In two years, the Trump administration approved just 16,155 claims, with DeVos whining that relief for such claims is “free money,” and the department actually referring some defrauded borrowers to the Treasury Department to have their tax refunds seized even though they have relief claims pending. DeVos has also tried to shift attention from for-profit colleges that committed fraud as their standard way of doing business, lying to students about their job prospects if they took on loans to attend, by citing the current college admissions bribery scandal.
”Let’s talk about the nonprofits that are doing a bad job, that are subject to bribes, that are lying in order to improve their U.S. News and World Report statistics,” DeVos ranted indignantly to a Senate panel recently. Except the ones that are subject to bribes? People may be going to prison over that, and the people paying the bribes could afford to do so. A corrupt sailing coach and an unscrupulous wealthy parent is kind of different than schools that embrace a business model of fraud perpetuated against students who cannot afford it and will never be able to afford it because they’ve been misled about their ability to get a job at a living wage.
Betsy DeVos is specifically scum, but the Trump administration ignoring a court ruling in order to keep harming vulnerable people is not specific to DeVos or her Education Department. This kind of lawlessness is what Team Trump is all about.