Former Obama officials join to protect student consumers
A cadre of attorneys and policy advisers from the Obama administration is teaming up to do what they say Education Secretary Betsy DeVos seems incapable of doing: protecting students.
They have formed a coalition, called the National Student Legal Defense Network, that will partner with state attorneys general and advocacy groups to combat what they describe as the erosion of civil liberties and consumer protections under the Trump administration.
“DeVos and the Trump administration continue to pursue a deregulatory agenda of protections for student loan borrowers and victims of civil rights abuses. They’ve created a real need for nonprofit groups and state prosecutors to step up,” said Aaron Ament, a former special counsel at the Education Department under President Barack Obama and co-founder of the new alliance.
The alliance includes top brass from Obama’s Education Department, including former deputy secretary James Cole Jr. and Office for Civil Rights chief Catherine Lhamon, and said it plans to use legal action to fight on behalf of consumers.
The network’s formation comes as liberal lawmakers and student advocates accuse the Trump administration of watering down the enforcement of regulations to safeguard student loan borrowers.
The Education Department has withdrawn, delayed or announced plans to revamp more than a half-dozen Obama-era measures involving federal student aid this year. That includes halting the borrower defense to repayment rule, which erases federal loans for students whose colleges used illegal or deceptive tactics to get them to borrow money to attend. The regulation was revised last year to speed up and simplify the claims process and shift more of the cost of discharging loans onto schools, much to the chagrin of for-profit colleges.
When DeVos announced the suspension of those changes in June, 19 Democratic state attorneys general sued. Ament said many of those same state prosecutors will work with his network to bring other litigation against the department if the regulatory rollback continues. He declined to provide names of the attorneys general teaming with the network or discuss specific cases in the works.
The Education Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In recent months, the department has taken steps to reshape its enforcement regime that have alarmed some student advocates. Many were dismayed by the selection of Julian Schmoke Jr., a former DeVry University dean with no legal or investigative expertise, to lead the Student-Aid Enforcement Unit at the Education Department.
The unit was created last year to root out fraud, waste and abuse within higher education. It was widely viewed as a response to the criticism that the department had been slow to act in the face of evidence that schools, especially for-profit colleges, were engaging in misconduct.