When Betsy DeVos was nominated to head the Department of Education, the main concern was what harm a “choice” crusader would bring to K-12 public schools. Recently we’ve seen that she can also cause damage with regard to post-secondary education.
DeVos announced plans to delay the implementation of rules on for-profit colleges that the Obama Administration fought long and hard to bring into being. Calling the plan unfair, DeVos said she wants to redo the rulemaking process from scratch – a clear sign that she wants to weaken or eliminate the restrictions. That’s the premise of a lawsuit just filed against DeVos by the attorneys general of 18 states and the District of Columbia.
The Obama campaign against predatory colleges was one of the most consequential initiatives of the administration on corporate misconduct. In addition to the rules – one of which is designed to bar federal loans at schools whose graduates don’t earn enough to pay off their debt and another that would make it easier to erase debt incurred at bogus institutions – the Obama Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau brought enforcement actions that helped bring about the demise of flagrant abusers such as Corinthian Colleges and ITT Educational Services.
And this came after the Obama Administration pushed Congress to get commercial banks out of the student loan business.
Taken together, the Obama era measures against predatory for-profit education represent one of the rare instances in which government action targeted not just an illegitimate practice or a miscreant company but an entire industry. The message was not simply that for-profit colleges needed to be reformed but rather that they should not continue to exist. It was capital punishment for capital.
It comes as no surprise that the billionaire DeVos, who has had personal involvement with dubious business ventures, is seeking to undo the crackdown on for-profit colleges. And it is yet another example of how the Trump Administration is working against the interests of those lower-income voters who put him in office.
The same dynamic can be seen in the healthcare arena. The Republican “solution” to the problems of the Affordable Care Act is to make it easier for insurance companies to offer bare-bones junk insurance while dismantling Medicaid, both in its traditional form and its expansion under the ACA. The latest version of the Senate bill is willing to retain the hated taxes on high-income earners as long as the assault on the socialistic Medicaid program moves forward.
It appears that the right’s desire to protect the interests of corporations – including the most predatory – is even greater than its wish to redistribute income upward. Thus the one thing that Republicans have made sure to do with their stranglehold on the federal government has been to roll back as many business regulations as possible.
It remains to be seen how long Trump and Congressional Republicans can get away with telling their working class supporters that predatory corporations are the ones that deserve relief.