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During her time as secretary of education, Betsy DeVos established a process to quickly adjudicate borrower defense to repayment claims -- applications for federal loan forgiveness from students who say they were cheated or misled by their colleges. Though the applications could sometimes be hundreds of pages, staff were given about 12 minutes to process each one, The New York Times reported, referring to Education Department documents filed in federal court.
In DeVos’s final year as secretary, the department denied 130,000 claims. The previous five years it had denied 9,000. DeVos was public about her dislike of the borrower-defense program, saying it was too generous with taxpayer money. The documents were obtained under court order by lawyers in a class-action lawsuit, concerning 200,000 people who brought borrower-defense claims to the department.
