October, 2020
Washington – Both the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government have recently taken note of on-going irregularities at the U.S. Department of Education. One wonders what took so long, but better late (in these cases, very late) than never.
On October 19, in a class action case against Secretary Betsy DeVos, a federal district judge threw out a settlement between the parties that was supposed to have resolved hundreds of thousands of long-standing student loan borrowers' claims for relief, due the borrowers because for-profit colleges had defrauded them. The judge wrote of a typical claim:
[T]he borrower’s path forward rings disturbingly Kafkaesque*.... Questions of legality plague the Secretary’s new perfunctory denial notice.... We need an updated record and updated discovery.... We need to know what is really going on.
Then, on October 22, regarding manipulation of accreditation by the DeVos Department, the chairman of the House Labor and Education committee issued subpoenas to get at the truth of the matter, writing this to the Secretary:
Due to the Department’s obstruction, the Committee’s only available avenue to obtain an accurate understanding of the Department’s role in the Dream Center collapse is to pursue depositions of the knowledgeable Department officials under subpoena. Accordingly, the Committee has served such subpoenas on the relevant Department staff.
Earlier in the year, the House Appropriations Committee put a stop to a major contract about to be awarded to a troubled student loan servicer under dubious circumstances.
The common thread connecting these three debacles involving billions of taxpayer dollars is agency corruption at the highest levels. It did not start with Betsy DeVos, by the way, but she has greatly exacerbated it. I was at the department in 2001 when corruption got its initial foothold, and I witnessed it in action. Many of the same people are still involved, as their fingerprints can be seen on each of the above scandals.
If the other branches want "to know what is really going on"— and I believe they do — there are excellent sources beyond what they will find in discovery and through subpoenas. One is Republic Report, where in its many iterations the peerless David Halperin explains the interconnections between predatory colleges and department personnel. Another is this blog (Three Capitals), which has explained in several posts over the past two years the corruption involved in the department's dealings with the student loan industry. Still another is Dan E. Moldea's new book, Money, Politics, and Corruption in U.S. Higher Education, which offers much relevant material from discovery and subpoenas in other investigations.
For details on what a federal judge found to be Kafkaesque, the webpage of the Project on Predatory Student Lending provides a veritable library of such cases. Inspector General reports, routinely ignored within the department, are another source.
Let's get on with determining "what is really going on." Upcoming depositions and testimonies under oath must require answers to questions about how and why department personnel, political appointees and civil servants alike, systematically set about to deprive borrowers their rights under law, violating in the process statutes prohibiting conflict of interest, obstruction of justice (including state law enforcement), perjury, and contempt of both the courts and Congress.
______________________________
* Franz Kafka has a Berlin connection; for a time in the 1920s he lived in Berlin-Steglitz, at Grunewaldstrasse 13. I passed the site often when I lived in Steglitz many years ago, not ever thinking a U.S. federal judge would someday compare Kafka's bizarre world to that of student loan victims.
