Senate Joins House: Rejects Betsy DeVos’ Rule to Protect For-Profit Colleges and Forgive Borrowers
In the summer of 2018, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed a revision in an Obama-era rule designed to protect student borrowers when their for-profit colleges shut down or when they believed they had been defrauded by a college’s predatory false advertising. DeVos’s proposed changes in the rule, called “borrowers defense to repayment,” would, she said, save the federal government $700 million annually. DeVos’s new rule had been scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2020.
Last Wednesday, however, the U.S. Senate voted to reverse DeVos’s proposed revisions to the rule. The House had approved the measure to overturn DeVos’s rule in mid-January. Politico‘s Michael Stratford reports that if President Trump signs the bill which has now passed both Congressional chambers, “the DeVos rule would be nullified, leaving in place the Obama-era standards. The Education Department would be prohibited from writing any new rule that is ‘substantially the same’ unless Congress acts.” In both the House and Senate, Republicans joined Democrats in voting to overturn Secretary DeVos’s new rule.
Stratford explains the implications of recent Congressional action to reverse DeVos’s rule: “The Senate on Wednesday issued a strong bipartisan rebuff to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, passing legislation to block her policy that makes it tougher for defrauded student loan borrowers to have their debts forgiven. Ten Republican senators broke with the Trump administration and joined with Democrats on a 53-42 vote to overturn DeVos’s rewrite of the Obama-era “borrower defense” rule, which governs debt relief for students whose colleges engaged in misconduct. The measure, which cleared the House last month, now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk. The White House has threatened a veto of the legislation which did not garner a veto-proof majority in either chamber. But Trump told Republican senators during a closed-door meeting on Tuesday that he was ‘neutral’ on the resolution… CONTINUE READING: Senate Joins House: Rejects Betsy DeVos’ Rule to Protect For-Profit Colleges and Forgive Borrowers | janresseger