House Democrats released documents Tuesday backing earlier claims that the
US Department of Education had stopped the development of a website designed to help students defrauded by for-profit colleges.
Angela Morabito, a spokeswoman for the department, had earlier denied reports that a department senior official had ordered to stop the site’s development because it provided too much information to the affected students to recover their loans through loan-forgiveness.
The reason the official gave for halting the website, according to a whistleblower complaint, was that the goal of the new borrower defense rule was to restrict loan forgiveness to those most severely wronged.
“Anyone who says that there has been any effort by anyone at the Department to delay or obstruct the development of a new borrower defense form or website is lying,” Morabito told U.S. News & World Report in June.
Instructions to Halt Work
While releasing the documents, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-New York), the chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Virginia), the chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, said: “We are deeply troubled that the Department of Education halted a web tool to help simplify and streamline the process for defrauded students applying for relief.”
“Regrettably, the department lacks any credibility to carry out this program fairly for these borrowers and their families.”
The 90-page documents contain emails between Accenture, the contractor hired to build the site, and Federal Students Aid employees, including repeated directives to halt work on the web page.
“I know this is disappointing, as many of us have done a lot of work to get to this point,” Jessica Barrett Simpson, a career staffer at the Department of Education who is a program manager of digital customer care at the Federal Student Aid office, wrote in an email to her team, according to U.S. News & World Report.
The revelations come on the heels of the disclosure the Department of Education made to a federal court last month that it has denied nearly all applications for loan forgiveness submitted by student loan borrowers who claim they were defrauded by their schools.