Trump Administration Considers Moving Student Loans from Education Department to Treasury -
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG, STACY COWLEY and PATRICIA COHENMAY 25, 2017
The Trump administration is considering moving responsibility for overseeing more than $1 trillion in student debt from the Education Department to the Treasury Department, a switch
that would radically change the system that helps 43 million students finance higher education.
“The reason the federal student aid programs live within the Education Department is because that’s the agency
that has as its goal increasing educational opportunities within the United States,” said David Bergeron, who left the Education Department in 2013 after 35 years.
“The Education Department is a policy shop with a trillion-dollar bank on the side,” said Rohit Chopra, a former student
loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who also briefly worked for the Education Department.
In his resignation memo, a copy of which was obtained by , Mr. Runcie said
that senior members of his department had met that day with Treasury officials and discussed “holding numerous meetings and retreats” to outline a process for “transferring all or a portion” of the student aid office’s functions to the Treasury Department.
A shift in handling federal student aid is being weighed as the Trump administration and Ms. DeVos consider overhauling the Department of Education.
“Moving the agency that is supposed to provide stewardship for student loan borrowers to an agency
that is working on a shoestring with a skeletal crew strikes me as a recipe for a policy disaster,” said Sarah Bloom Raskin, who was the deputy Treasury Secretary under President Obama.
