Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is very, very mad that politicians have a say in how she handles student loans, and now she's calling for the loans to be spun off into its own federal agency. She is sick of “the ever-changing political whims of Washington,” and “cannot fulfill its mission” in its current form. (Really, she wants it privatized, so her family can make even more money off them!) Via the New York Times:
“I’m not so sure the federal government should monopolize student lending,” she said in a speech at the start of a four-day training conference in Reno for 5,000 financial aid officers from schools nationwide. “But if it does — and, for now, it essentially does — then it must provide services on par with world-class financial firms.”
The Department of Education has for years drawn criticism from government auditors and lawmakers of both parties for its slipshod management of the vendors it hires to service its ballooning portfolio of loans. But Ms. DeVos has faced especially intense disapproval from borrowers and their advocates.
During her tenure, a program to relieve the debts of teachers, police officers and others who work in public-service jobs has become a bureaucratic disaster, rejecting nearly all who apply. The department allowed a troubled for-profit chain, Dream Center Education Holdings, to collect millions of dollars in federal funds that it was ineligible to receive before it collapsed this year.
And a federal judge recently held Ms. DeVos in contempt of court for illegally collecting on the debts of thousands of students defrauded by another, defunct for-profit chain of colleges. (In a court filing on Monday, the department said it had incorrectly tried to bill 45,000 borrowers, nearly three times the number it had previously acknowledged.)
Oh, Ryan. Such a cynic! He went on to say:
"My read is that if Trump does this through executive order it can be undone by executive order. As long as Democrats don’t pass it into law, she can’t make it permanent. Needless (?) to say the DeVos family is heavily invested in the student loan industry and this is just flat out corruption."
