Education Secretary Betsy DeVos faces another lawsuit for overturning an Obama-era rule – Yahoo Finance
A group of consumer advocates filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education (ED) for revising an Obama-era rule that was designed to protect students who were defrauded by predatory schools.
The group is challenging the department’s revised rule on borrower defense, calling it “fatally-flawed” and “grounded on the false premise that student borrowers are the bad actors.”
The lawsuit was filed by the Project on Predatory Lending and Public Citizen Litigation Group on behalf of the New York Legal Assistance Group, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
“This devastating rule goes above and beyond the department’s other significant efforts to deny defrauded students loan relief,” Project on Predatory Student Lending Director Toby Merrill said in a press release. “It imposes impossible standards for defrauded students seeking to assert their legal rights to loan cancellation, and relies on explanations that defy logic and rest on no evidence. There is no question this rule is illegal and will not stand up in court.”
In response to the lawsuit, ED Press Secretary Angela Morabito told Yahoo Finance in a statement that the “Department will vigorously defend its regulation, which gives students and borrowers the relief that they’re owed, restores fairness and due process, extends the period for closed school discharges, and saves the taxpayers up to $11.1 billion over ten years.”