Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s choice to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Defense, was, during the first Trump administration, paid by the main trade group representing for-profit colleges, and he spoke out against legislation aimed at protecting military service members and veterans from deceptive schools that bury former students in debt.

Perhaps owing to Donald Trump’s apparent infatuation with Hegseth, the bill stalled during Trump’s term. But it ultimately was enacted, with strong bipartisan support, soon after Joe Biden became president. 

As first reported back in 2019 by Media Matters and ProPublica, Hegseth spoke that summer in New Orleans at the annual convention of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), which for decades has been the leading Washington DC lobbying group representing the wealthy owners of for-profit colleges.

In his remarks, Hegseth endorsed a campaign by CECU to block a bill, eventually supported by key congressional Republicans, as well as Democrats, to amend the federal 90-10 law. That provision bars for-profit colleges from receiving more than 90 percent of their revenue from federal taxpayer-funded grants and loans — on the theory that if a school cannot obtain serious funding from students, employers, states, or private scholarships, then they likely are not great value.

Under a bizarre distortion of the 90-10 law that had been achieved by predatory college lobbying, Congress had declared that student financial aid provided to veterans, active duty military members, and military family members by the departments of defense and veterans affairs did not count as federal aid, leaving only student grants and loans from the U.S. Department of Education tabulated on the federal 90 side of the 90-10 equation. One stark effect of this delineation was to give for-profit schools a powerful incentive to treat military troops and veterans as “dollar signs in uniform“; because they needed the VA and Pentagon grants to make the 10 percent quota, for-profits heavily targeted vets for recruitment, often into low-quality programs that left them deep in debt and without the careers they sought.

In 2019, many of the leading national veterans organizations — including the American Legion, Student Veterans of America, Vietnam Veterans of America, and Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America — called on Congress to close this 90-10 loophole in order to protect service members and veterans.

In response, CECU launched a front group called Veterans for Career Education to oppose the change in the law, claiming that requiring schools to actually get 10 percent of their revenue from sources besides the federal government unfairly restricted students’ educational choices.

Hegseth became CECU’s high-profile advocate for this effort to shield predatory college abuses. Speaking at the CECU meeting in New Orleans, Hegseth praised for-profit colleges, claiming, “The fact that profit is made only makes these schools better.” He charged that “some of these extreme leftists, Democrats, unfortunately at this point, they’ll say that these college degrees are mediocre, worthless, that schools prey on vets…. And you and I both know that is just not true. I can’t get involved in something that I don’t fundamentally believe in.”

Hegseth cast doubts on the motives of some veterans advocacy groups, asserting, “There are a lot of veteran organizations in Washington that say they support vets, but they also — they really just want to get invited to the cocktail parties…. They’re really drunk on the swamp and the power and the access they have there.”

Hegseth suggested he would leverage his relationship with Trump to convince him to reject the 90-10 reform bill. “If anything were to ever pass in the House, in the Senate right now that restricted veterans choice,” Hegseth predicted, “it would get the fastest … veto stamp or pen you’ve ever seen. So, right now you’ve got a president that would veto the bad stuff. And if he ever gave me a call — and sometimes he does — I’d tell him that.” 

Hegseth told the assembled for-profit college owners and executives he was “so excited to be working with” CECU.  “I’m all-in on this effort,” he said. “I cannot wait to get even more involved, go to Washington, be with this organization, be with the vets, travel around the country, put pressure on the folks that deserve to have pressure put on them.” 

Hegseth was not exaggerating with his boast of access to Trump. He appeared well-positioned to influence the Trump administration on the bill, as President Trump seemed highly taken with the “Fox & Friends Weekend” host. Hegseth had interviewed Trump multiple times on his Fox morning show and dined at the White House with Trump at the president’s invitation. Trump repeatedly fawned over Hegseth on Twitter.

Trump in 2018 also reportedly had been considering installing Hegseth as his Secretary of Veterans of Affairs, replacing David Shulkin, reportedly because Hegseth, on TV, regularly expressed enthusiasm for privatization of VA health care, an initiative supported by wealthy friends of Trump, and Shulkin was deemed insufficiently supportive of that idea. Hegseth had previously been the head of the groups Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative group, financed by the billionaire corporate owners Charles and David Koch, that advocated for such private outsourcing of veterans health care.

Hegseth also had publicly pressed Trump to grant pardons or other relief to former armed service members punished for high-profile war crimes, an action Trump took, acknowledging Hegseth, in November 2019.

Hegseth, an Iraq and Afghanistan war Army veteran, obtained his higher education not at one of the overpriced, low-graduation-rate for-profit colleges that he shilled for, but at the Ivy League’s Princeton and Harvard.

ProPublica tallied at least eleven speeches Hegseth gave in 2019 for CECU and related groups. His appearance at the association for California for-profit schools was billed as “sponsored by Career Education Colleges and Universities.”

It’s unknown how much CECU paid Hegseth, but Media Matters reported, based on campaign finance records, that Premiere Speakers Bureau was in that period charging other political groups $5,000 to $10,000 for appearances by Hegseth.

In addition to personal appearances, Hegseth opposed the bipartisan 90-10 reform bill in op-eds published on the websites of Fox News and The Hill. He wrote for Fox News: “I’ve met these veterans. I’ve met these college administrators. Nobody is being duped. In fact, to the contrary, these schools are improving the lives of veterans every day!” Neither article included a disclosure that Hegseth was working with CECU. 

CECU’s membership list over the years has included some of the worst-offending predatory for-profit colleges, schools caught using high-pressure sales tactics and deceptive advertising to trick veterans, single moms, and others into enrolling, then over-charging them and under-spending on instruction, all the while lying to government regulators.

CECU stopped posting online its list of member schools around 2021, after at least one website (this one) repeatedly called it out for harboring awful schools. But, even though some of the biggest and worst schools on the CECU roster have shut down under the weight of their own frauds, or else quit CECU years ago, we know bad schools have remained on the CECU membership rolls. Those have included Florida Career College, which closed this year after the Department of Education found egregious violations and cut off federal aid. We also know what college operators are on the CECU board of directors, including one long-serving and active board member, the imperious for-profit college baron Arthur Keiser. 

To fight back against efforts to hold it accountable for abuses, the for-profit college industry has hired big-name Democrats and Republicans, including former senior members of Congress, as outside lobbyists, and alternating Democrats and Republicans have served as the hired leader of CECU (which was previously called APSCU, and before that, CCA). The current CECU president, selected for the Biden era, is Democratic former congressman Jason Altmire.

Past keynotes hired to address the CECU convention have included a bipartisan roster of former high-ranking politicians, crossed with the occasional celebrity: George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton, Bob Kerrey, Martha Stewart. (One year, Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed to speak at the convention but then, without public explanation, cancelled (after we questioned whether he should go there).)

Notwithstanding all the bipartisan dressing, the for-profit college owners who dominate CECU and its industry lean heavily Republican. And Republican politicians have grown closer and closer to the industry and its campaign dollars over the past twenty years, while Democrats, with some exceptions, have increasingly seen a moral and fiscal responsibility to stand up against the predatory abuses that many for-profit colleges have inflicted on striving Americans. 

Leaders in the for-profit college industry, aggrieved by Obama administration efforts to hold predatory schools accountable, had sought and found a savior in Donald Trump. Trump himself ran a predatory and deceptive unaccredited for-profit real estate school, Trump University, and he felt he was treated very unfairly when New York’s attorney general and former students sued him, a dispute that ended with Trump agreeing to pay $25 million in 2016.

Trump’s administration, with Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, staffed the Department of Education with former for-profit college executives and did almost everything in its power to get rid of the Obama administration’s accountability rules and safeguards aimed at curbing predatory college abuses. 

Despite the effort by Hegseth and CECU to block the 90-10 reform, in November 2019, four senators, including Republicans James Lankford (OK) and Bill Cassidy (LA) introduced new legislation to get the reform done. Lankford said at the time, “This bill is a bipartisan solution to put the best interest of our veterans first while also recognizing that the majority of for-profit post-secondary institutions, but unfortunately not all, offer quality programs that accommodate the needs and unique skill sets of our veterans and servicemembers.”

Other, CECU-backed Republicans in Congress managed to stall the 90-10 bill, as Hegseth had advocated, for the duration of Trump’s presidency.

But in March 2021, less than two months after Joe Biden was inaugurated, Congress passed, and the president signed, the provision until law, as part of the $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus bill. 

The Biden administration has, moreover, reversed many of the Trump-DeVos policies, and has taken ever stronger steps against bad-acting colleges.

The Defense Department, with its control of student aid programs for military service members and their families, plays an important role in protecting against abuses by predatory schools. Some of the biggest for-profit chains, including the giant University of Phoenix, have been caught blatantly deceiving and abusing veterans, and sometimes the Pentagon has imposed penalties. 

But generally DoD has been weak on for-profit college accountability, and under the pro-industry Hegseth — who has repeatedly advocated for corporations that pay him, and not for the rank and file military service member victims of scams — it is likely to get much, much weaker.

More broadly, if confirmed as defense secretary, Hegseth would take charge of the largest military in the world and an $800 billion annual budget. An unidentified “former Pentagon official from the Trump administration” told CNN that Hegseth is “the least qualified person in the history of the job.”

The new defense secretary would also be in charge of implementing some of the Trump team’s unprecedented policies, such as a reported plan to oust senior military officers suspected of lacking full loyalty to Trump.

Trump has been sharply criticized as reckless and unfit by senior military leaders who worked under him, including former Joint of Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Miley, former White House chief of staff General John Kelly, former Secretaries of Defense General James Mattis and Lt. Colonel Mark Esper, and former national security adviser General H.R. McMaster. 

Hegseth already has publicly endorsed the idea of Trump firing general and admirals deemed too “woke,” including the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General CQ Brown. Hegseth has suggested that Brown might not have been appointed to the job by Biden if he were not Black.