Student loan debt is a big problem for many Americans. For students who attended fraudulent institutions, student loan debt can be even more problematic. The Obama administration had set forth plans and rules to help such students. DeVos’s department of education wanted to delay them.
However, Wednesday a federal judge ruled that Betsy DeVos’s delays of the Obama-era regulations around loan forgiveness for defrauded students were illegal.
DeVos had intended to delay the Obama-Era rules until 2019, with the intention of rewriting them. Obviously, Democrats and consumer rights advocates took issue with this plan and U.S. District Court Judge Randolph agreed as outlined in a 57-page decision:
…the Department failed to justify adequately its invocation of the good cause exception to the negotiated rulemaking requirement. Given that procedural flaw, the Court does not reach Plaintiffs’ substantive challenges to the rule. Finally, the Court considers Plaintiffs’ challenges to the Section 705 Stay and concludes that § 705 stays are subject to judicial review and that the Department failed to offer a reasoned basis to stay the implementation of the Borrower Defense Regulations.
The Trump administration’s proposed plan for defrauded borrowers would mandate a much higher burden of proof in order to have the student loans in question forgiven.
This is not the only Obama-era regulation the Trump administration has attempted to scale down or rollback. Recently Betsy DeVos sought to reverse Obama’s policy on campus sexual assault.