Jon Oberg, a former Department of Education researcher, warned that student loan companies were abusing a subsidy program
and collecting millions in federal payments to which they were not entitled.
Photo by Michael Temchine for The New York Times.
When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.
For three more years, the vast overpayments continued. Education Secretary Rod Paige and his successor, Margaret Spellings, argued repeatedly that under existing law they were powerless to stop the payments and that it was Congress that needed to act. Then this past January, the department largely shut off the subsidies by sending a simple letter to lenders — the very measure Mr. Oberg had urged in 2003.
The story of Mr. Oberg’s effort to stop this hemorrhage of taxpayers’ money opens a window, lawmakers say, onto how the Bush administration repeatedly resisted calls to improve oversight of the $85 billion student loan industry. The department failed to halt the payments to lenders who had exploited loopholes to inflate their eligibility for subsidies on the student loans they issued.
Recent investigations by state attorneys general and Congress have highlighted how the department failed to clamp down on gifts and incentives that lenders offered to universities and their financial aid officers to get more student loans.
This from the New York Times.
Listen in: NPR has several programs following the student loan scandal.
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