WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate on Wednesday voted to repeal a controversial regulation by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that her critics say harms defrauded student loan borrowers.
Senate Democrats forced the vote under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to repeal federal regulations within 60 days of being finalized. In January, the US House of Representatives also approved a resolution rejecting the so-called DeVos’ borrower defense rule.
Senate voted 53-42 on Wednesday to repeal this rule. Ten Republicans broke ranks on the vote. Pennsylvania’s two senators, Democrat Bob Casey and Republican Pat Toomey, split on the vote. Casey, of Scranton, voted yes, while Toomey, of Lehigh Valley, voted against the resolution, according to the official roll call.
The future of this rule is currently uncertain. The White House threatened to veto the bill resolutionand overriding this veto would require a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. The number of votes in both chambers did not exceed this threshold (Chamber voted 231-180 for approval of the resolution in January).
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The White House said in its statement threat of veto that repealing the rule “will restore the previous administration’s partisan regulatory regime that sacrificed the interests of taxpayers, students and schools in pursuit of narrow, ideological goals.”
But on Tuesday, Trump told GOP senators he was “neutral” on the issue, Politico reported.
The Trump administration’s borrower defense rule reversed the Obama administration’s policy of forgiving loan debts if students were defrauded by schools.
During Obama’s term, consumer protection claims began to come in from students who attended for-profit colleges. The huge raise in claims followed the closure of Corinthian colleges, which left hundreds of thousands of students in debt and with an education of little value.
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The Obama administration established a loan forgiveness system for institutional misconduct. DeVos, however, changed an Obama-era rule that she said was too costly for taxpayers.
Critics say the up-to-date policy does not provide enough protection for defrauded students and creates unfair obstacles for borrowers seeking aid.
“Here’s what it comes down to: Hundreds of thousands of federal student loan borrowers were defrauded by their schools,” U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who led the Senate effort to torpedo the rule, said Tuesday.
Durbin, however, said that while students are awaiting action from the Department of Education, “they have done nothing other than adopt a new rule that states that it will be more difficult for students to prove fraud at this point.”
