No More Excuses: Sen. Warren Lambastes DOE on Student Loans
(COMMON DREAM) Deirdre Fulton, March 9, 2016 — Can the U.S. Department of Education be trusted to protect the millions of Americans with federal student loans?
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has tussled with the federal agency before, isn’t so sure.
She said as much in a letter (pdf) sent Thursday to acting Education Secretary John King Jr., in which she describes an independent audit published this week as “a stunning indictment of the Department of Education’s [DOE] oversight of student loan servicers, exposing the extraordinary lengths to which the Department will go to protect those companies when they break the law.”
Warren’s letter was in response to a DOE inspector general’s report (pdf), which found that the agency conducted a deeply flawed investigation of its student loan servicers—companies like Navient, which collect borrowers’ monthly payments—and knowingly misled the public about the findings.
In fact, she said, the review released Tuesday raises “serious questions about whether the Department and its Office of Federal Student Aid can be trusted to protect the millions of borrowers under its care.”