Secretary DeVos, I want to start by telling you a story about my constituent, Artemisa.
Back in 2009, she became a student at Heald College in Modesto just months after it was
purchased by Corinthian Colleges.
Artemisa wanted to make a difference in her community, she was pursuing a medical assistant
degree.
She chose Heald because she saw on the commercials that it had an 85% job placement rate.
Seemed like a good investment.
But then she graduated and she couldn’t find a job.
And now she owed a whopping $40,000 in student loan debt for a degree that hasn’t helped
her get hired.
That may not seem like a lot of money to you, Secretary DeVos, but in the real world, that’s
devastating.
Turns out, Artemisa wasn’t alone in not being able to find a job.
Corinthian Colleges around the country lied about their job placement.
They told her it was an 85% job placement rate for Heald.
Turns out, the actual rate was zero.
Not 85%-- zero.
That’s a big difference.
Artemisa and tens and thousands of students were defrauded by Corinthian.
We all know this.
We all agree.
In 2014, the Department of Education fined them $30 million for this fraud.
Everyone agreed.
But here, 5 years later, Artemisa still has that $40,000 in student loan debt, she still
hasn’t found a job in her field, and she still hasn’t gotten any help whatsoever.
The reason for that is becuase you have put roadblock after roadblock in front of helping
these students.
Your job is to fight for them.
But instead, your actions suggest you would prefer to be the chief lobbyist for the predatory
schools that defrauded them.
After being ordered by a federal court to stop collecting debts from cheated Corinthian
students, you ignored the order and kept stealing money from these students.
You were even held in contempt of court because of it.
You’re not standing up for them, you’re working for the schools that defrauded them.
Maybe you’ve forgotten to refund these student.
Maybe Artemisa’s $40,000 in student loan debt doesn’t sound like a lot to you because
it’s only one-tenth of one percent of one of your family’s ten yachts.
Artemisa and tens of thousands of others have been waiting years for your help.
You have deliberately violated a federal court order and I’m confused why.
So I guess I just have one question for you, Secretary DeVos: are you deliberately violating
this court order because you’re too corrupt to uphold the law or because you’re too
incompetent to do your job?
Congressman, let me begin by saying that I took great personal offense to everything
you just said.
I come to my job everyday on behalf of students.
I don’t need to sit and listen to what you just spewed out of your mouth.
I don’t understand how you could— I did not defy any court order.
I instructed federal student aid to follow the court order.
If you had been here earlier, you would have known that mistakes were made on the part
of federal student aid employees and on the part of loan servicers that, when they were
discovered, they were immediately acknowledged and corrected.
Secretary DeVos, reclaiming my time please.
They have been remediated— I understand that you are taking offense.
The reality is there are tens of thousands of students whose financial futures have been
ruined by three years of inaction.
And you’re just making excuses, you’re blaming this problem on somebody else.
You’ve been Secretary of Education for 3 years!
And you are trying to defy the facts of this matter.
Yes or no, were you held in contempt of court and fined?
Congressman, I have not been able to address all of the Corinthian College claims because
a court stopped us in May of 2018.
That’s simply not true.
That is true.
The courts said there was nothing stopping the department from processing these borrower
defense claims.
There was something stopping-- there was a lack of process.
The court said we could simply forgive them all.
But that was not the right answer.
The right answer is to do what’s right for students and to do what’s right for taxpayers.
And that is my goal and that is going to continue to be my goal.
Secretary DeVos, what’s right for students is helping the tens of thousands of students
who have been defrauded, students like Artemisa.
And blaming this problem on somebody else, taking three years to make absolutely no progress,
it’s not helping these students.
It’s only helping the scam colleges that defrauded them.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Where students have been financially harmed, they are going to have relief.
We have a new methodology which, once again if you had been here earlier, you would have
known.
We have just implemented it last week, we are beginning to process them again.
And students will be considered, their claims considered individually, and I am looking
forward to addressing all of them.
Nothing disturbs me more than all of the pending claims that have been there and that we have
not been able to address appropriately.
This is Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos as she’s finally confronted for her handling
of what’s called the borrower defense to repayment rule.
To claim that her management has been subpar would be the understatement of the century.
The program is meant to forgive federal loans for students whose colleges misrepresent the
quality of their education or otherwise engage in fraudulent behavior.
And despite the fact that DeVos, like her boss, spent her time blaming the Obama administration,
the fact is that the program was actually expanded under the previous administration.
And it was running smoothly only UNTIL Trump took office and DeVos took the reins of the
Education Department.
Under her leadership – and I say that word with every caveat imaginable – loans were
no longer discharged and the pool of 60,000 pending claims exploded to over 200,000.
Now, DeVos has claimed that she’s just as frustrated as everyone else and that certainly
this weighs on her more than anyone.
But first of all, while she might cry victim and pretend that she’s frustrated too, something
tells me that billionaire Betsy DeVos’ frustration is probably just a TAD less than the regular
Americans whose financial futures have been destroyed at the hands of predatory, fraudulent
universities only to be screwed again by a government that’s more sympathetic to those
scam artists than the victims.
And beyond that, DeVos has had THREE YEARS to figure this out.
This is not Obama’s fault.
This is not the victims’ fault.
The disbursement of loan relief and forgiveness is HER DEPARTMENT’S responsibility, and
the fact that she’s not only NOT found a solution, but actually EXACERBATED the problem
is a testament to just how egregiously incompetent she is.
And that’s only made worse by the fact that, in this time, she’s actually CONTINUED to
collect federal debts from defrauded students, even in violation of a federal court order.
That she would literally defy the law to entrench the victims of fraud in their financial problems
is a perfect testament to who this woman is and where her interests lie.
Now, DeVos leans on the excuse that, three-quarters into her tenure, she’s finally found a solution,
and that is to only grant full forgiveness to students with median incomes far below
their peers in similar programs, while the rest of the students will have 25% to 75%
of their debt erased, again depending on the median income of the program.
In other words, despite the fact that the entire premise of the expenditure was based
on fraudulent pretenses, despite the fact that their financial lives have been wrecked,
despite the fact that the time spent getting their worthless degrees is time they’ll
never recover, despite the fact that they now have no jobs with which to repay the rest
of their debt because, again, the path they used to GET those jobs was doomed from the
start, they still might be left with the vast, vast majority of that financial burden.
Yeah no that seems fair to me.
And look, I don’t think anyone would disagree that the fraud claim has to be validated,
that the government isn’t and shouldn’t be in the business of handing out free money.
But to only issue 25% relief to a student who’s then responsible for 75% of loans
that were born out of something fraudulent, out of a scam, is a complete and total abdication
of our government’s role to PROTECT its citizens—ESPECIALLY the most vulnerable
among us.
Something tells me that if Betsy DeVos went to her local yacht dealership and it didn’t
float on the water and was only entitled to 25% back, that she would suddenly realize
that maybe protecting the scammers and not the victims isn’t the best policy after
all.
And, of course, it starts at the top, considering DeVos was handpicked to leader the Department
of Education by Trump, who HIMSELF was ordered to pay a $25 million settlement for students
defrauded at his OWN sham university.
The settlement marked the end of two class-action lawsuits and a civil lawsuit form New York
accusing Trump of quote “Swindling thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars through
Trump University,” according to New York attorney general Eric Schniederman.
And so let’s be honest-- of course an administration led by a guy who ran a sham university doesn’t
have sympathy for students defrauded by sham universities.
The simple fact is that in an administration marked by the appointment of those hostile
to the departments they run, that no one comes close to Betsy DeVos is a testament to just
how singularly awful she is.
I mean, this is an administration with Mick Mulvaney, with Rick Perry, with Mike Pompeo,
and those are just the ones who didn’t end up in prison—and yet that BETSY DEVOS is
the one who needs a security detail tells you everything you need to know.
And so when congressman Josh Harder asks her the question, “Are you deliberately violating
this federal court order because you are too corrupt to uphold the law or because you are
too incompetent to do your job?” the only acceptable answer here is “yes.”