Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on June 5, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
A U.S. Department of Education official has filed a whistleblower complaint, alleging that the Trump and DeVos administration deliberately made it harder for student loan borrowers to apply for a loan forgiveness program.
The whistleblower complaint concerns the Borrower Defense to Repayment program. This loan forgiveness program was originally enacted by the Obama administration to provide student debt relief to students who were misled, defrauded, or otherwise harmed by predatory colleges and universities.
The Trump administration has been trying to rewrite the rules governing the Borrower Defense program since 2o17, weakening the relief provided to student loan borrowers and increasing the burden of proof required to prevail.
President Trump recently sided with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and vetoed bipartisan legislation that would have restored the Obama-era Borrower Defense regulations. In the meantime, the Department is settling a class action lawsuit brought by student loan borrowers, who alleged that the administration illegally refused to process over 170,000 pending Borrower Defense applications, in some cases for years.
The whistleblower contends that career Department of Education officials were tasked with redesigning the Department’s Federal Student Aid website, and that part of that redesign involved the creation of a new, user-friendly web interface for borrowers interested in applying for student loan forgiveness under the Borrower Defense program. But, according to the whistleblower, senior Department of Education officials pushed back on the user-friendly nature of the website. One official allegedly told the whistleblower that the website provided borrowers with too much information and made it too easy to apply, which was contrary to the Department’s vision for the Borrower Defense program.
The Department of Education ultimately scrapped the proposed website altogether. Career employees at the Department are apparently in an ongoing internal battle with more senior officials and political appointees to rework the site’s design. The whistleblower maintains that the goal of these more senior officials is to allegedly restrict access to the Borrower Defense loan forgiveness program and make it harder for borrowers to apply for relief.
A Department of Education spokesperson disputed the allegations in the whistleblower’s complaint, stating that, "Anyone who says that there has been any effort by anyone at the Department to delay or obstruct the development of a new borrower defense form or website is lying.”
In the meantime, student loan borrowers are taking Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to court again, arguing that the new Borrower Defense rules are an illegal attempt to deny relief to student loan borrowers under the program. “These students were lied to and cheated by predatory schools, and every dollar of federal student loan money was based on those lies. They have a legal right to cancel every dollar of those loans,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, an organization representing the borrowers in that lawsuit.
Further Reading
Student Loan Borrowers Sue DeVos To Overturn Loan Forgiveness Rule
Dept. Of Education Discloses Illegal Seizure Of $2.2 Billion From Student Loan Borrowers
Veterans’ And Consumer Groups “Heartbroken” After Trump Vetoes Student Loan Relief Bill
