July, 2020
Washington – When people testify before Congress under oath, they are admonished that they must tell the truth or face penalty of perjury.
A new report of the House Committee on Education and Labor explains that an official of the U.S. Department of Education, Diane Auer Jones, did not tell Congress the truth about her ill-fated involvement with a predatory for-profit school and an accreditation authority, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC). The details are available in excellent coverage by the Washington Post and by Republic Report, which first broke the whole unfortunate story months ago based on many whistleblower accounts.
The House Committee was able to come to its conclusion without the cooperation of the Department of Education, which withheld documents. This poses another problem: obstruction of Congress's legitimate oversight role.
The new report is hardly a surprise. Diane Auer Jones has had a problem with the truth on other occasions as well. I recall hearing her untruthful testimony on the matter of another accrediting agency, ACICS, which clearly, to anyone familiar with the facts, was perjury. She twice told a House committee, under oath, that she was required by a court to reinstate ACICS when she knew it was not true. She was under no court order to reinstate the agency, as she claimed, only to review its performance, a huge difference affecting millions of dollars and the fate of many students who became victims of fraud.
As far back as 2007, this same politically-appointed official was willing to make public statements (albeit not under oath) excusing student loan lenders that had defrauded taxpayers. She told the Washington Post that the amounts of fraud could not be determined, and therefore no attempt would be made to recover hundreds of millions of dollars, despite numerous Inspector General and internal audits to the contrary. The episode is recounted in Dan Moldea's new book on corruption in higher education, p. 78. This was clearly a harbinger of things to come.*
What is of more interest to me, rather than whether Diane Auer Jones is capable of telling the truth, is what happens when a person in her position doesn't.
If there is no actual penalty for perjury, it only encourages more perjury, from other officials. If there is no penalty for obstruction, it only encourages more obstruction.
The conservative writer George Will has called the Trump Administration a "Gangster Regime." That's an apt description. The question is whether Congress will do anything about it, beyond reporting the obvious.
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* One of the lenders, PHEAA, committed perjury itself when it denied the existence of a plan to increase certain loan holdings so as to claim higher government subsidies in an amount of $116 million, a scheme the Inspector General determined was illegal. The actual plan was uncovered in 2017, in spite of PHEAA's determination to hide it, but to date nothing has been done to discipline PHEAA through the Department's Limitation, Suspension, and Termination (LS&T) authority, or through other measures to debar or suspend PHEAA from future contracts. To the contrary, the Department has attempted to shield the contractor from borrower and consumer lawsuits alleging gross mismanagement, such as those against PHEAA initiated by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York. To add insult to injury, the Department this month was about to award PHEAA a major student loan servicing contract, despite its manifest shortcomings, before the House Appropriations Committee began to ask questions and the Department backed off (probably temporarily) from its bid solicitation.
