As the Department of the Interior’s inspector general did the right thing and began a conflict-of-interest investigation of newly-confirmed Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, the previous Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, continued his own egregious course of doing the wrong thing. As the AP reported Tuesday, Zinke has accepted a job with Nevada-based U.S. Gold
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Faced with a roomful of Democrats, now in control of the House of Representatives, who questioned her hard about the Department of Education’s failures to follow the law, help students, or prevent ugly collapses of bad-acting for-profit college chains, Secretary Betsy DeVos took a page from her boss, Donald Trump: She repeatedly blamed Barack Obama’s
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Regarding the recent epidemic of for-profit college closures, Steve Gunderson, the chief lobbyist for that industry, has taken his shamelessness to new heights — brazenly suggesting that the shuttered schools have no connection to his lobby group, CECU, when he knows full well that they used to be members, and mischaracterizing industry critics’ views on
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Just before Christmas, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education, which operates CollegeAmerica, Stevens-Henager College, and Independence University, dismissed its lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education, which had, in the final year of the Obama administration, refused to recognize the company’s schools as non-profit for purposes of federal regulations; the Department under Obama had
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As Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education works this morning to outsource more and more taxpayer-funded student aid to predatory for-profit online education companies, Wall Street investors see a new gold rush. Seeking to avoid the stigma and regulatory requirements of openly running a for-profit college, they are finding willing partners in another taxpayer-funded sector: state
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Senators Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) today introduced the Preventing Risky Operations from Threatening the Education and Career Trajectories of Students (PROTECT Students) Act of 2019, a bill that would enshrine in law many key reforms sought by advocates for veterans and other students in order to prevent predatory practices by for-profit colleges.
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In October 2016, candidate Donald Trump unveiled a package of government ethics reforms that he said would “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC; it included a ban on former federal employees lobbying the government for five years and stricter rules on what constitutes lobbying. He seemed to be promising to undermine the power of special
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Michael Cohen chose to conclude his dramatic Capitol Hill testimony today with a pointed warning about President Trump. “I fear,” Cohen said, “that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” In other words, Cohen raised the concern that Trump would refuse to leave the White
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