Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, billionaire Linda McMahon, has now echoed Trump’s last education secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos, by claiming that fighting fraud in higher education means going after students, rather than holding accountable the predatory for-profit colleges and wealthy school owners who have repeatedly been caught deceiving students and taxpayers.

Trump himself agreed to pay $25 million soon after he was elected in 2016 to settle claims by students and New York state that his unaccredited for-profit real estate school, Trump University, misled and overcharged them.

After Trump took office, DeVos and her team dismantled many of the Department of Education teams and rules aimed at preventing other deceptive colleges from scamming students and ripping off taxpayers.

DeVos notoriously charged that regulations issued by the Obama administration to help students defrauded by their colleges get some of their loan debts cancelled were simply a means of giving scheming student loan borrowers “free money.”

Now McMahon, along with Elon Musk’s DOGE squad, have made even deeper, and illegal, cuts to Department staff, including staff charged with holding abusive colleges accountable, and she has launched a rulemaking process that ultimately is likely to overturn most of the regulations created by President Biden to protect students and taxpayers. Trump’s nominee to lead higher education work under McMahon, Nicholas Kent, is a former lobbyist for the for-profit college industry and former executive of a for-profit school that settled fraud charges with the Justice Department.

The Trump II Department of Education, also, quietly cancelled a $37 million fine that the Department, under the Biden administration, imposed in 2023 on Grand Canyon University. The fine was levied after Department investigators documented extensive findings that GCU, which takes billions in taxpayer dollars, systematically deceived students about the costs of their educations.

Today, McMahon’s Department of Education issued a press release claiming that it now “Fights Fraud in Student Aid to Protect the American Taxpayer.” But the fraud described by the Department does not mention the for-profit schools that have received tens of billions in taxpayer dollars and have faced scores of law enforcement actions for deceptive and dishonest behavior — or any other schools for that matter.

Instead, McMahon lists ways she will be going after students.

McMahon says the Department will enhance screenings of student financial aid records to ensure that students don’t receive more Pell grants than the law permits. She claims that nearly $40 million in student loan payments, and $6 million in Pell Grants, were “incorrectly disbursed to ineligible individuals.” She charges that financial aid has been going to deceased persons — allegedly over $30 million over the past three years — and she pledges to stop it.

And, of course, McMahon also says the Department will be going after immigrants: “Individuals granted immigration parole status, a temporary designation issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), are not immediately eligible for federal student aid. The Department has gained additional specificity on student status from DHS to prevent disbursements to ineligible individuals moving forward.”

Waste, fraud, and abuse in any federal program is unacceptable.  Fraud by students, or people claiming to be students, is serious, and the Department of Education is right to be concerned about it and to take action.  But the millions in losses that McMahon asserts were caused by students pale in comparison to the tens of billions taken by fraudulent for-profit colleges. And McMahon and Trump seem to be doing nothing about that.