Whistleblower: Education Department Killed Website That Made Applying for Loan Forgiveness Too Easy – U.S. News
A whistleblower complaint said a senior Education Department official scrapped the website because it provided borrowers with too much information.
THE TRUMP administration rejected a website that the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office designed to help students who have been defrauded by their colleges apply for loan forgiveness, arguing the tool made the process too easy, according to a whistleblower complaint.
The development of the website was part of a $90 million federal contract to build one main hub for all federal student aid needs that modernized existing loan servicing portals and made them more user-friendly – in the same way that the application for federal student aid was recently redesigned and streamlined to make it easier for students to apply.
As part of the larger redesign, staff at the Federal Student Aid office, all of whom are career officers and not political appointees, were tasked with developing a website that would allow students to apply for what’s known as borrower defense – a process by which students whose colleges mislead them about things like job placement rates, average earnings post-graduation and the transferability of credits to apply for some or all of their debt to be forgiven.