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Boeing Crash Shows Perils of Allowing Corporations to Regulate Themselves

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The death of 157 people on an Ethiopian Airlines flight earlier this month was an awful human tragedy.

It’s also a cautionary tale about what happens if we allow corporations to regulate themselves.

The public is starting to learn more about the circumstances behind the crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet in Ethiopia as well as in a similar lethal crash in Indonesia last fall. Both crashes of a brand-new new model of airplane may be connected to the failure of an automated system designed to prevent the plane from stalling. Federal prosecutors and the U.S. Department of Transportation are investigating the development of the 737 MAX, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The roots of the problem go back to well before Donald Trump became president. Over the past decade, the FAA has pushed to delegate responsibility for assessing risk to airplane manufacturers themselves.

The Seattle Times reported that managers at the Federal Aviation Administration in 2015 pressed safety engineers at the agency to delegate assessments of safety to Boeing and pushed for approval. A former FAA safety engineer told the newspaper that “there was constant pressure to re-evaluate our initial decisions” and “there was continued discussion by management about delegating even more items down to the Boeing Company.”

These troubling revelations are raising serious concerns among aviation experts. “It raises for me the question of whether the agency is properly funded, properly staffed and whether there has been enough independent oversight,” Jim Hall, an aviation-safety consultant and former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board told Bloomberg News.

The FAA’s sluggishness is consistent with the agency’s reputation for regulatory lethargy. The Transportation Department’s former inspector general, Mary Schaivo, has criticized the agency for more than two decades, saying it exhibits a pattern of failing to act until lives are lost. “Our safety agency is called the tombstone agency … because they wait for major loss of life before they make a safety change,” she told lawmakers in 1997, after the crash of ValueJet flight in the Florida Everglades killed 110 people.

It may take or months to get to the bottom of what happened in the two tragic crashes. But it is clear that Boeing, a defense contractor and airplane maker, has long had a cozy relationship with politicians of both parties.

Former President Barack Obama lavished praise on Boeing, calling it an “iconic company,” and touted his administration’s record in selling Boeing’s planes. “Other than maybe the CEO of Boeing, I don’t know anybody who’s done more to sell Boeing planes around the world than me and this administration,” Obama said. While in Vietnam last month, President Donald Trump praised two Vietnamese airlines for purchasing more than 100 Boeing jets. Even after the Ethiopia crash, Trump called Boeing a “a great, great company with a track record that is so phenomenal.” Boeing contributed  $1 million toward Trump’s inauguration and contributed the same amount to President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Federal law prohibits government contractors from making campaign contributions to candidates, parties and political committees. The law is intended to prevent companies from bribing officials to win lucrative contracts and to prevent lawmakers from extorting money from companies with business pending before the government

However, the absence of strict rules requiring major public companies and federal contractors to disclose their political activity to shareholders and the public means that companies can funnel money through a web of untraceable dark money entities.

Unfortunately, another major loophole in the law defeats this purpose: contractors may establish PACs to make these same campaign contributions. Boeing takes full advantage of this loophole, laundering millions of dollars of campaign contributions directly to lawmakers and even to dark money groups. As a result, Boeing has well-endeared itself to those responsible for issuing defense contracts. Boeing shareholders have filed a resolution up for a vote at the company’s annual meeting in April calling on the company to disclose the full extent of its lobbying activities.

Since 1990, Boeing’s political action committees and individual company employees have contributed $32.6 million to federal candidates, with 52 percent going to Republicans and 46 percent going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The company has spent nearly $170 million on federal lobbying over the past 10 years.

Boeing has received more than $100 billion in unclassified defense contracts between 2014 and 2018, according to Reuters, and received $64 billion in federal loans and loan guarantees and $457 million in federal grants from 2000 to 2014, according to a study by Good Jobs First.

As of last year, 98 lobbyists represented Boeing, with 71 having previously worked for Congress or the executive branch, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Of these 98 lobbyists, 31 work for Boeing directly, with the remainder working for outside firms. The revolving door between Boeing and Congress swings both ways; CNN reported that a former Boeing lobbyist, John Keast, is staff director of a key Senate committee overseeing aviation issues.

The small army of lobbyists advocating for Boeing include dozens of former congressional and federal agency staffers as well as one former congressman, retired Rep. Norm Dicks, a Democrat from Boeing’s former home state of Washington.

Dicks had the moniker “Mr. Boeing” and helped the company win a $35 billion air tanker refueling contract. When the contract was announced in 2011, Dicks said it was “the happiest day in my professional life.”

Boeing also has employed 51 people who either currently serve as federal officials or have done so in the past. Those include Patrick Shanahan, the current acting secretary of defense, who spent more than 30 years as a Boeing executive before joining the Trump administration.

Though Shahahan is required to recuse himself from decisions involving Boeing, the Pentagon has faced criticism over several multibillion–dollar contracts awarded to Boeing, as well as an ethics complaint calling for an investigation into whether Shanahan promoted Boeing and disparaged competitors. The complaint came after a report by Bloomberg said that a Pentagon request for $1.2 billion for 12 Boeing F-15X fighter aircraft was made “with some prodding” by Shanahan. Defense News reported that the purchase of the aircraft “ was essentially forced upon the Air Force.”

Politico reported that Shanahan’s loyalty to Boeing continued into his government service. Shanahan reportedly excoriated Boeing rival Lockheed Martin over its $1 trillion F-35 fighter jet, calling it  “f—ed up” and claiming that if the contract for this jet “had gone to Boeing, it would be done much better.”

The Justice Department’s national security division is led by John Demers, a former Boeing vice president and assistant general counsel.  Another former Boeing executive, Mira Ricardel, worked as deputy national security adviser, but was fired after a dispute with Melania Trump.

After the Ethiopia crash, Trump spoke on the phone to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who argued that the planes should not be grounded. It wasn’t until a day later that both Trump and Boeing reversed course in the face of public pressure and grounded the planes – after Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany and the European Union had already done so. Muilenburg has said he developed a personal relationship with Trump, telling a radio interviewer in February that Trump “cares about business” and “creates open communication lines.”

We need elected officials and regulators who will stick up for the safety of the flying public rather than the profits of airplane makers.

 

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Enforcement of Consumer-Protection Laws Sinks Under ‘Tough-on-Crime’ Trump

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Law enforcement activity at three large U.S. consumer protection agencies has fallen sharply under President Donald Trump, as the White House continues to put corporate interests ahead of the middle class.

A new Public Citizen report, “Consumer Carnage,” examined enforcement activity at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding cases that resulted in fines of $5,000 or more.

The analysis found that during Trump’s first two years in office, these agencies completed a total of 84 enforcement cases combined, a 37 percent decline from 133 cases completed during President Barack Obama’s last two years in office.

More specifically, Public Citizen found that enforcement activity against corporations:

  • Sank by more than 50 percent at the CFPB once the Trump administration assumed control over the agency in late 2017. The CFPB completed 11 enforcement actions in 2018 under Trump-appointed leadership, compared with 24 the prior year, when the CFPB was led by an Obama-appointed official.
  • Fell to only seven cases at the CPSC during Trump’s first two years in office, compared with 13 in Obama’s final two years.

“Members of the Trump administration have made abundantly clear they perceive their function as serving and assisting corporations instead of holding them accountable for lawbreaking,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “Under this president, federal agencies have slashed fines, declined to bring cases against corporate wrongdoers and gutted enforcement programs. The result is a government that is eager to throw consumers under the bus.”

The change at the CFPB in particular has been especially egregious. Public Citizen found that under Trump, the CFPB has moved to terminate investigations, settled cases, lowered fines or imposed no fines at all in at least 10 instances. In one recent case, the CFPB fined a lender accused of swindling veterans out of their benefits just one dollar after the lender claimed he couldn’t pay.

At the CPSC, two Democrats on the commission have written strong dissents to the agency’s settlements in cases involving defective jogging strollers whose front wheels could detach suddenly during use (at least 50 children and 47 adults were injured) and trash cans whose back protective collars could become dislodged, exposing a sharp edge (at least 60 people have been injured). And the FTC has yet to sanction Facebook over potential violations of a 2011 FTC consent decree over privacy issues.

For the report, Public Citizen examined enforcement cases at the three agencies from 2015 through 2018 and used the Violation Tracker database compiled by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First.

Trump’s appointees’ apparent belief that enforcement of consumer protection laws should be a last resort represents a dramatic about-face from Trump’s claim of populism during his campaign. Trump, who once asserted that he was ‘not going to let Wall Street get away with murder,’ now is allowing industry after industry to get away with just about anything.

Read the report (PDF).

Caught in the Crosshairs of Corporate Power. Part 5: Predatory Mortgage Lending

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This is part five of a five part series.

When political candidates spend their time begging for cash from wealthy interests and legislating to prioritize private profits over the public good, regular people lose out. The corporations and superrich donors that dominate our elections have an outsized influence over who wins, what gets discussed in campaigns and what legislative ideas receive serious consideration.

The sweeping legislative package known as the For the People Act (H.R. 1) contains ethics, campaign finance and voting rights reforms that are essential to make our government work effectively and fairly.

To illustrate the need for reforms that reduce corporate influence and redistribute power to the people, Public Citizen compiled stories of five regular Americans whose lives have been impacted by corporate political power.

Corporate Power Spotlight: Predatory Mortgage Lending

“I didn’t realize that I myself had become a victim of subprime lending.”

Douglas Coleman, 53, Washington, D.C.

Douglas Coleman still has fond memories of buying his two-bedroom condominium with a skylight and a fireplace in Washington, D.C.

After getting the keys to the $220,000 condo on a snowy February day in 2007, he grabbed his dog, a portable stereo and an inflatable mattress and spent the night there — even before bringing in his furniture.

“I was so excited to move into the place,” he said.

More than a decade later, Coleman, 53, is still dealing with the financial aftermath. He had purchased his home by taking out a risky, no-money-down loan – the kind of loan that was common in the mid-2000s and led to the nationwide foreclosure crisis and Great Recession.

A New York City native and graduate of Howard University, Coleman worked as an information technology specialist for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. After going through a divorce, Coleman was skeptical about his ability to qualify for a loan. A friend connected him with a mortgage broker. Before he knew it, he was a homeowner.

“I was just so eager to get the property,” he said. “I thought I was never going to qualify.” In retrospect, he said, the lender asked for “very limited documentation, not nearly what enough for what I should have needed to qualify.” Despite working at HUD at the time, “I didn’t realize that I myself had become a victim of subprime lending,” Coleman said.

Coleman’s loan changed hands shortly after it was originated, and wound up being handled by Countrywide Financial, the infamous subprime mortgage lender. “I started seeing them on the news. That’s when I was like, OK, I think I’m in a very bad situation,” Coleman said.

At HUD, Coleman earned a six-figure salary. But after both his father and his sister became ill, Coleman wound up traveling back and forth between Washington and New York to take care of them. Coleman missed a lot of time at work and ultimately resigned from his position so he could take care of his family members, both of whom have since died.

A father of two, Coleman tried to get by on a patchwork of jobs, including a food truck business. But due to the reduction in income and his need to pay child support, he could not make ends meet. He wound up in foreclosure. “I was embarrassed to talk about it,” he said. “I didn’t really want to say anything. I watched many a friend lose their properties a result of similar loans.”

Coleman’s struggle highlights how African American communities were targets of predatory lending practices in the 2000s and suffered disproportionately from the foreclosure crisis. The black homeownership rate, which is well below that of other ethnic groups, has now fallen to about 43 percent from a mid-2000s peak of nearly 50 percent.

Around 12 years after getting his loan, Coleman still isn’t sure whether he can stay in his home.

With the assistance of lawyers from the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, Coleman received a loan modification, but has not been able to restore his prior income. He now works as a customer support representative for a contractor that provides building services to an international development organization, where he earns about $45,000 a year.

Coleman supplements that modest income by driving an Uber, doing product demonstrations at health-food stores and working for an educational travel company. “I’m working four jobs just to try to make up for the income of the one that that I had before.”

Still struggling to get by financially, Coleman is behind on his mortgage, contemplating filing for bankruptcy and thinking about giving up his home.

“I would love to hold onto that property because that was always my dream to move in there,” he said. However, he said, “between the constant legal battles, dealing with everything and the emotional stress, it’s almost to the point where you’re like …I don’t know if it’s worth it to continue the fight.”

CORPORATE INFLUENCE AT WORK

The mortgage crisis could have been prevented. Despite numerous warnings about rampant predatory practices in the mortgage industry, lawmakers and bank regulators failed to crack down on predatory lending due an intense pushback from lenders.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s several lawmakers in Congress tried to stop subprime lending abuses but these reforms stalled. At the state level, tough predatory lending legislation in Georgia passed in 2002 but was rolled back a few months later amid an industry outcry. Corporate-friendly bank regulators appointed by the Bush administration failed to crack down on predatory lending. Several of the most-troubled institutions, including Countrywide Financial, IndyMac Bancorp and Washington Mutual, were supervised by the federal Office of Thrift Supervision, which failed to regulate those lenders and wound up being merged into another bank regulator. Federal regulators who tried to sound the alarm bell found themselves stymied.

Even after Wall Street and the big banks crashed the financial system with abusive mortgage loans, the industry’s influence persisted. The industry fought hard, though unsuccessfully, against the creation of an independent consumer protection agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Once the CFPB was created, industry critics then worked to attack and undermine the CFPB through corporate-friendly lawmakers in Congress.

The Obama administration failed to fight aggressively for industry-opposed legislation that would have allowed borrowers to reduce their debts in bankruptcy. It also said no to other alternatives, such as a revival of a federal mortgage refinancing program from the 1930s. Instead, the federal government program that responded to the mortgage crisis helped far fewer homeowners avoid foreclosure than initially promised. Then, the Obama administration’s Department of Justice largely shied away from aggressively prosecuting Wall Street banks or executives and failed to break up the largest Wall Street institutions, leaving megabanks in place despite their threat to financial stability.

KEY FACTS:

The for-profit college industry has:

  • Spent more than $168 million on lobbying in Washington over the past decade.
  • Contributed nearly $45 million in campaign money to Congress over the past 30 years, with money coming from PACs and individuals tied to the industry.
  • Contributed 55 percent to Congressional Republicans and 45 percent to Democrats.

SOURCE: Center for Responsive Politics.

LOBBYING AND CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS:

Top recipients of mortgage industry donations, excluding presidential candidates, include Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala,) the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, with more than $370,000 during his career, followed by two former chairmen of the Senate Banking Committee, former Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), who received $345,000 and Sen. Richard Shelby (R.-Ala.), who received $336,000.

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to thank the Center for Responsible Lending, Legal Aid of the District of Columbia, Alex Shebanow/Fail State and T1International for helping to recruit the people featured in this report. All photos are courtesy of those featured.

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Caught in the Crosshairs of Corporate Power. Part 2: Payday Lenders

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This is part two of a five part series.

When political candidates spend their time begging for cash from wealthy interests and legislating to prioritize private profits over the public good, regular people lose out. The corporations and superrich donors that dominate our elections have an outsized influence over who wins, what gets discussed in campaigns and what legislative ideas receive serious consideration.

The sweeping legislative package known as the For the People Act (H.R. 1) contains ethics, campaign finance and voting rights reforms that are essential to make our government work effectively and fairly.

To illustrate the need for reforms that reduce corporate influence and redistribute power to the people, Public Citizen compiled stories of five regular Americans whose lives have been impacted by corporate political power.

Corporate Power Spotlight: Payday Lending

“What seems initially like help turns out to be nothing but hurt.”

– Wayne Wright, 59, Jacksonville

Starting about a decade ago, Wayne Wright, 59, of Jacksonville, Fla., started using payday loans. He had already drained his savings and destroyed his credit score after being laid off from a computer programming job.

Wright was raising two teenagers on a single income and had switched careers, but there were times when money wasn’t lasting from one month to the next. “I had more month than I had money,” he said.

Wright, who was living in Nashville, Tenn. at the time, took out loans from storefront and internet lenders to make it from one month to the next, but quickly found himself stuck in a debt trap, repeatedly borrowing money to pay back the last loan, plus fees.

“What seems initially like help turns out to be nothing but hurt,” Wright said. “Unless something happens in your life to break that cycle, you’re stuck.”

These days, Wright works as a home health care nurse in Florida and is on far more solid ground financially. He was able to get out of the payday loan cycle after his sister loaned him $2,600 and let him pay back that money gradually.

“It took outside intervention to help me totally just get free from them and then I never got another,” Wright said.

Though he hasn’t taken out a payday loan since 2015, Wright said he’s still getting calls from online lenders aggressively pushing out loans with lines like “your first one can be free” and “you have a good record with us.”

Payday lenders, which often target low-income borrowers, are effectively banned in states that with firm caps on the interest rate that lenders can charge borrowers.

But this kind of lending remains legal in much of the country.

Wright believes there should be limits on the number of times borrowers can renew payday loans, which typically last two weeks.

Once that limit is reached, the loan can be converted into a loan that can be paid off in a fixed number of installments rather than renewed in perpetuity.

His advice to people who are considering taking out payday loans?

“Just don’t. Do whatever you got to do. Sell your couch instead. You can always buy another one.”

CORPORATE INFLUENCE AT WORK

Under Trump, high-rate payday lenders have been hard at work pushing to roll back safeguards for consumers, undoing regulations established during the Obama administration and curtailing investigations of the industry. The payday lending industry’s main trade group has held its annual conference– and a golf tournament – at the Trump National Doral Golf Club near Miami. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed to eliminate safeguards for consumers seeking payday or auto title loans that require lenders to assess whether borrowers have the ability to repay their loans. The Washington Post reported that a payday industry lawyer seeking to get rid of regulations on the industry worked closely with an academic researcher to publish a study claiming that taking out repeated loans doesn’t harm borrowers. Though the CFPB spent more than five years of research and study on its payday-lending rules, the bureau has indicated that it may not fully defend the rule against a lawsuit from payday lenders and has done the industry’s bidding by formally proposing to roll back the Obama-era protections that would help people avoid getting caught in cycles of ever-increasing debt.

KEY FACTS:

The payday loan industry has:

  • Spent nearly $57 million on lobbying in Washington since 2008.
  • Contributed nearly $11.8 million in campaign money to Congress over the past 30 years, with money coming from PACs and individuals tied to the industry.
  • Contributed 64 percent to Congressional Republicans and 36 percent to Congressional Democrats.

SOURCE: Center for Responsive Politics.

Republicans and Democrats alike have been recipients of payday industry donations, and have both used their positions of power to benefit the industry. Former Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) received nearly $324,000 from individuals and political action committees tied to the industry over his career. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has received more than $218,000 in payday contributions. Former Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, received $202,000. Other notable recipients of payday contributions include Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), Rep Steve Stivers (R-Ohio.) Former Rep. Mick Mulvaney, the current acting White House chief of staff and budget director who also served as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, received nearly $63,000 from payday lenders during his congressional races. As acting director of the CFPB, Mulvaney ended multiple investigations into high-cost lenders, including one involving World Acceptance Corp., a lender from which Mulvaney had received campaign donations.

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Caught in the Crosshairs of Corporate Power: How Americans are Harmed When They Lack a Voice in Washington

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This is part one of a five part series.

When political candidates spend their time begging for cash from wealthy interests and legislating to prioritize private profits over the public good, regular people lose out. The corporations and superrich donors that dominate our elections have an outsized influence over who wins, what gets discussed in campaigns and what legislative ideas receive serious consideration.

The sweeping legislative package known as the For the People Act (H.R. 1) contains ethics, campaign finance and voting rights reforms that are essential to make our government work effectively and fairly. The legislation would enact:

Comprehensive campaign finance reforms to end dark money and reduce the power of corporations and the wealthy to influence our elections. Under the bill, elected officials would be able to finance their campaigns from individual donations, with a match from the federal government.

Desperately-needed government ethics reforms to combat conflicts of interest by slowing the revolving door between public service and powerful business interests and strengthened oversight and enforcement of ethics laws and rules.

Voting and electoral reforms that would end gerrymandering, knock down barriers to voting and reaffirm the principle of one person, one vote.

Since Donald Trump’s election, corporate America has had a field day in Washington. Regulatory rollbacks and plummeting enforcement against corporate violators are leaving Americans more exposed than ever to profit-seeking predators. Meanwhile, massive tax cuts are allowing industry to get away without paying its fair share, and our meager social safety net programs have faced constant legislative threats.

To illustrate the need for reforms that reduce corporate influence and redistribute power to the people, Public Citizen compiled stories of five regular Americans whose lives have been impacted by corporate political power.

Corporate Power Spotlight: Higher Education

“It’s just one thing after another to hurt students.”

– Sanders Fabares, 39, San Diego

In 2003, Sanders Fabares was seeking to break into the film industry and wanted to get trained on how to use digital video production equipment. While looking at job ads, he saw an advertisement for an open house and barbecue event at the Art Institutes of California in San Diego.

At the time, he had limited knowledge of for-profit colleges. But after taking a tour, Fabares was impressed by the school’s sophisticated cameras and video equipment. A school’s recruiter boasted of a 95 percent job-placement rate, and pushed him aggressively to enroll, he said.

The job-placement rate was the main reason Fabares enrolled in the Art Institutes program, never considering that a school might not be truthful about such an important statistic. But the school’s former parent company, the now-bankrupt Education Management Corp., owned by Goldman Sachs and two private equity firms, later faced allegations of overly aggressive recruiting practices and exaggerating job-placement rates. The schools’ new owner has been closing down campuses.

Fabares found the Art Institutes program to be almost worthless, especially compared with the University of Arizona, where he had already studied to get a bachelor’s’ degree. With a high ratio of students to teachers, Fabares found it incredibly difficult to enroll in the classes he needed.

Fabares, now 39, and his wife, Jay, 36, met in a drawing class at the Art Institutes. They graduated with combined debt of about $96,000. They have made consistent payments but have only been able to cut their debt down to about $73,000 over the past 13 years, taking intermittent art jobs in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area before moving back to San Diego.

Fabares has filed a request for debt relief under the Education Department’s “borrower defense” program, which cancels debt for defrauded students. Four years after applying, he has yet to receive an answer. “If life throws you any curveballs under this debt, it’s going to make you default,” he said. “It’s doing to blow you out of the water. All it takes is a life change.”

Fabares currently works for a consulting firm that moderates companies’ online presence. The couple also works as caretakers for his elderly grandparents. Having a large amount of debt, “affected just everything we did,” he said. “We weren’t able to save hardly anything. We just were living paycheck to paycheck hoping something would pan out.”

Now Fabares is involved in efforts to hold for-profit schools and the Education Department accountable for their actions. He encourages former students from The Art Institutes to join the Facebook group “I Am AI” to meet others seeking justice.

Having attended rule-making sessions held by the Education Department, he has seen in person how lobbyists and for-profit colleges have fought meaningful oversight. “It’s just one thing after another to hurt students,” he said.

CORPORATE INFLUENCE AT WORK

For-profit colleges that saddle students with mountains of debt and worthless degrees have successfully lobbied Congress and the Education Department to block or weaken rules that protect students. As a result, millions of students and graduates around the country are burdened with debt and disillusioned.

KEY FACTS:

The for-profit college industry has:

  • Spent nearly $71 million on lobbying in Washington since 2008.
  • Contributed more than $13.6 million in campaign money to Congress over the past 30 years, with money coming from PACs and individuals tied to the for-profit college sector.
  • Contributed 53 percent to Congressional Republicans and 46 percent to Congressional Democrats.

SOURCE: Center for Responsive Politics.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, the Education Department started taking steps to rein in predatory for-profit college operators. Officials successfully cut off the flow of federal student loan money to some of the worst abusers. But under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the department’s efforts to protect students from predatory schools are being gutted. Several investigations into the for-profit college industry have been scotched, and DeVos has brought on several former for-profit college executives who are now overseeing the same companies where they once worked or represented. DeVos has made it more difficult for defrauded students to get their loans discharged and scaled back rules designed to weed out poor career-training programs at for-profit schools. Meanwhile, student debt continues to rise: According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, there is $1.46 trillion in outstanding U.S. student loans, with about 9 percent of that in serious delinquency, having had no payments in 90 days.

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