A government program meant to forgive the federal loans of cheated students has all but stopped functioning, the New York Times reported. No Education Department employees are devoted full time to investigating borrowers’ complaints. Instead, the agency’s staff has fought in court to reduce the amount of relief granted to some students and to halt a rule change intended to speed other claims along. That has left more than 100,000 claims for relief in limbo, according to the Education Department’s most recent data. The relief program, called borrower defense, became a popular way for students to seek debt forgiveness after several major for-profit schools went bust in recent years. During the Obama administration, the Education Department approved about 30,000 claims, more than half of them in the final two weeks before the new administration took over. All of those borrowers had their loans fully forgiven. But President Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, who before taking office invested in companies with ties to for-profit colleges and student-loan debt collectors, has derided the program as a “free money” giveaway and vowed to make changes. She has also appointed a former dean of DeVry University — a for-profit school that is the subject of some 10,000 fraud claims by former students — to oversee the unit that runs the program. As of mid-2018, her department had approved only 16,000 claims, and Education Department officials confirmed that about 15,000 of those were granted partial forgiveness. Tens of thousands more still await a decision.
