Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is being sued again. This time around, she is the target of a class action lawsuit by student borrowers who say she is illegally limiting the amount of debt relief they should get under federal law. The complaint, filed by the Harvard Law School Predatory Student Loans Project and the Citizen Public Litigation Group, challenges a policy change released by DeVos last year. Before this change, defrauded student borrowers could get full debt relief, but now DeVos only allows partial forgiveness.

Under the Higher Education Act, the “borrower defense” rule allows the education secretary to pay off the debt of schools that have defrauded students. Instead of forgiving the entire debt incurred by a student to attend a school that defrauded him, the new policy would write off only a portion based on his expected earnings, according to a formula proposed by the ministry.

This formula is said to have an impact on students seeking debt relief after for-profit schools like ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges defrauded them. When DeVos and the Education Department proposed the new policy, she defended the formula as “scientifically sound” in a House Education and Labor Committee hearing. But academics and political analysts quickly dug holes in the formula.

Temple University Economist and Higher Education Expert, Doug Webber, PhD, wrote a average guest message for Congressman Mark Takano (D-CA) pointing out the flaws in the formula proposed by the ministry. Webber described the formula as “trash in, trash out” and said it was “totally inappropriate and confuses many statistical concepts that are not intended to be used together.”

Depending on how the formula worked, a defrauded borrower would receive a partial discount based on the “damage” they suffered, as defined by DeVos in the calculation. Thus, a borrower who was the victim of fraud, but who had a job, even though their income was low, might only receive a partial rebate. The Ministry’s calculation did not take into account whether or not the borrower could have obtained this job without going to university or whether his education was in any way related to the job.

Webber analyzed the data provided by the ministry and showed how difficult it would be for some borrowers to get a full discount. Students who took dental assistant programs – both associate’s and bachelor’s programs – would have been required to take a program where the “median graduate earns less than -5,468.27 in order to have the all of its released loans “.

In case you missed it, this is negative $ 5,000 in earnings to get all their loans paid off. Student borrowers could have earned below-poverty wages after a school defrauded them and the ministry forgave only part of their debt. It would be mathematically impossible for borrowers to receive a full discount in one-third of the programs according to ministry data released at the time. And that was just the start of the problems with the formula.

DeVos and the Trump administration have been very active on the borrower defense rule. In addition to proposing this new formula, DeVos delayed the implementation of the Obama administration’s plan. 2016 rule when she took office before finally proposing her own. The Obama rule was supposed to go into effect in July 2017, but Secretary DeVos delayed it long enough to rewrite the rule.

Many believed that his rule favored colleges too much by creating a standard that was too elusive. DeVos’ new borrower defense rule created an almost impossible burden of proof if student borrowers were to receive student loan forgiveness. Under the previous rule, students could show material misrepresentation on the part of the school to obtain relief.

But under DeVos’ rule, students would be required to show that the school made a false statement knowing it was false. Or they had to show that the school had acted with reckless disregard with accurate information. But even worse, student borrowers would have to prove that they have suffered financial harm.

The new rule set an unreasonable standard that would be incredibly difficult to prove. Predatory schools that defraud students usually don’t say out loud that they are lying to students on purpose.

Congress accepted. On a bipartite basis, Congress quashed Secretary Betsy DeVos’ borrower defense rule using the Congressional Review Act led by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Congresswoman Susie Lee (D-NV).

For a while, it was unclear what President Trump would do with the resolution. Veterans groups pushed the president to sign it, even broadcast an ad on Fox News to target it. However, late on the Friday afternoon after Memorial Day, President Trump vetoed the bill, sending it back to the House where a waiver is expected.

This lawsuit is not the only lawsuit that Secretary DeVos faces and it is not the only one concerning her actions regarding the defense of the borrower. In fact, the Predatory Student Loans Project is also sue DeVos on its 2019 borrower defense rule. Federal judge ordered DeVos to halt debt collection efforts in 2018 and even detained her contempt.