The first weeks of the Department of Education under the second Trump administration have been, in a word, eventful. Even as storm clouds gather over the agency’s continued existence, the new Trump appointees started a slew of investigations of school districts with policies that violate Title IX, directed schools to throw out racially discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts or lose federal funds, killed nearly a billion dollars in woke educational grants and contracts, and laid off scores of probationary employees.
That’s a productive month.
One reason for this productivity is that the courts have already blocked a host of key Biden-era education regulations. In the first Trump term, the department was faced with unraveling a Gordian knot of rancid policy choices and heavy-handed regulations embedded by the Obama administration. Not so with Trump 2.0.
Take the Biden rule that extended Title IX to prohibit “gender identity” discrimination. It’s been wiped from the books by two federal district courts, with more to follow. Nationwide preliminary injunctions have also blocked two Biden student loan regulations estimated by independent experts to cost taxpayers more than half a trillion dollars over 10 years. Congress is likely to squash these rules in budget reconciliation to help offset tax cuts.
As a result, the new Trump education team has not been saddled with the time-consuming, life-sucking exercise of having to rescind and replace the worst of Biden’s regulatory changes — a process that would have devoured tens of thousands of hours of the new team’s time and easily taken more than two years. Soon-to-be confirmed Education Secretary Linda McMahon can hit the ground running, unburdened by what has been.
When it comes to higher education, Trump 2.0 is preparing for a muscular enforcement role against traditional universities unaccustomed to being under the agency’s microscope. The administration has already signaled that enforcement efforts — from civil rights reviews to financial and compliance audits — are very much on the table for these institutions, particularly those considered “elite” by residents of the Northeast. While the Biden administration focused its ire on for-profit institutions (the Left’s perennial punching bag), the new team is widening the crosshairs of the agency’s enforcement apparatus to target universities formerly considered untouchable.
A wildcard in the new administration’s work is Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The Education Department is a target-rich environment for Musk’s tech bros. The cancellation of DEI grants and employee layoffs have made headlines, but one area deserving of special DOGE treatment is the department’s $1.7 trillion student aid program.
As with COVID-19 relief funds and USAID programs, an audit of the Office of Federal Student Aid’s operations would be eye-opening. The Biden administration spent countless hours canceling student loans and did nothing to improve FSA’s operations, as demonstrated by last year’s FAFSA fiasco, which locked tens of thousands of college-bound students out of FSA’s financial aid application portal.
A DOGE audit of FSA would reveal the true value of the nation’s student loan portfolio and determine the exact cost of Biden’s student loan cancellations. Americans are entitled to know whether banks with federally insured deposits are insolvent; it should be no different with FSA, the nation’s largest consumer lender.
One area demands a deep DOGE dive: the $17 billion in student loan cancellations made by the previous administration pursuant to “borrower defense to repayment” authority, which allows the department to cancel the student loans of borrowers allegedly harmed by a school’s fraud or other misconduct toward the student.
As with the FAFSA portal, one concern is that the Biden regime was careless, even lawless, in its administration of the borrower defense program and that it used this authority as a substitute for the blanket student loan policies ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Biden v. Nebraska. Other than self-lauding Biden-era press releases, taxpayers have no idea how the department decided which students were “harmed” or why their student loan debt was canceled (read: paid off by the taxpayers).
A recent report from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce explains that the Biden administration “distorted” and “weaponized” the borrower defense program to provide “illegal en masse debt ‘forgiveness’” never authorized by Congress. The Biden team approved loan cancellations for borrowers who filed nothing but a cursory online application without sufficient documentation or proof of harm by their schools.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LAUNCHES ‘END DEI’ PORTAL AT EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
One concern is the extent to which these borrower defense applications read similarly, if not identically, or whether they even provided any documentation of institutional misconduct. This raises the question of whether outside groups sympathetic to the Biden administration acted as conduits for an industrialized assembly line of “cookie cutter” loan cancellation applications that provided little or no proof of fraud by a school.
After four years of mismanagement, it’s time for a deep dive into FSA and student loans. McMahon could launch that effort by working with DOGE to determine the portfolio’s actual value, as well as the waste, fraud, and abuse that has occurred in the department’s borrower defense loan cancellation program.
Robert S. Eitel is the president and co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies. He served as senior counselor to former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos from 2017-2020.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
Author
