Trump Administration Cancels Meetings That Pro-Student Groups Sought on DeVos Rules – Republic Report
The Trump White House today notified student advocacy organizations that it was cancelling or refusing to schedule meetings to discuss the Department of Education’s new rules that relax accountability for colleges and college accreditors. The Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs sent emails to the Center for American Progress, the Century Foundation, and the Institute for College Access and Success, all of which had requested meetings to discuss the rule; the messages stated, “An issue occurred with your meeting request and it has been declined.” OMB already had scheduled a meeting with New America; that group today received an email stating that the meeting “has been cancelled.”
The proposed rule, which these organizations and many more have argued will give unscrupulous for-profit education companies new ways to rip off students and taxpayers, was devised by Betsy DeVos’s top higher education aide, Diane Auer Jones. The Department was required by law to assemble interested parties for a series of meetings called negotiated rulemaking, but the Department heavily skewed the panel in favor of institutions and against students. Then the Department and its allies on the panel aggressively pressured the few pro-student representatives to accept a consensus rule, threatening that in the absence of consensus the Department was free to draft its own, even more anti-student rule.