The U.S. Education Department under President Donald Trump and Secretary Betsy DeVos has stopped cancelling the student-loan debt of people defrauded by failed for-profit schools and those borrowers face mounting interest and other burdens, its inspector general said yesterday, Reuters reported. DeVos is seeking to redo the process for cancelling the debts of people who attended Corinthian Colleges, which collapsed in 2015 amid government investigations into its post-graduation rates, and other failed schools. In the final days of his administration, President Barack Obama approved rules speeding up the debt cancellations. DeVos has delayed implementing those rules, saying that they would create significant costs for taxpayers. According to a report by the inspector general, DeVos also brought the existing cancellation process to a crawl. Since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, the department has received 25,991 claims for discharging loans. It has denied two requests and approved none, the inspector general, an independent auditor within the agency, found. That is in contrast to Obama’s final months in office. From July 1, 2016, through inauguration, the department received 46,274 claims and approved 27,986. It denied none. Caught in limbo, borrowers are seeing interest and fees accrue and their credit damaged, the inspector general’s report showed. Borrowers could ultimately owe more on a denied discharge than if they had not asked for cancellation and simply continued making payments, the inspector said.
