Betsy DeVos Would Very Much Like Someone to Do Her Job For Her

Not troubling oneself with anything boring seems like the best part of being rich. Rich people can afford to hire less rich people to do all the tasks that make life tedious: managing a household, raising children, working at a business. Perhaps that’s why Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a very rich person whose family got that way by having other people sell their shitty Amway products, wonders if maybe America might be better off outsourcing the student loan crisis to someone who isn’t her.

And who does DeVos think should be in charge of managing the untenable student debt crippling America’s young people? According to the New York Times, DeVos believes for-profit corporations are the best option for dealing with a bunch of boring poor people who can’t afford to make good on their loans, or, if not them, some other government agency that she is not involved with:

“I’m not so sure the federal government should monopolize student lending,” she said in a speech at the start of a four-day training conference in Reno for 5,000 financial aid officers from schools nationwide. “But if it does — and, for now, it essentially does — then it must provide services on par with world-class financial firms.”

In DeVos’s defense, her proposal that someone else do her job isn’t a terrible one because she is very bad at her job. Under DeVos, loan forgiveness programs meant to relieve teachers, police officers, and other public servants who owe staggering amounts of money to the government for their college educations have failed miserably. The program was so poorly managed that most who applied were rejected. In October, a judge threatened to jail her if she didn’t stop forcing students to pay back loans to a fraudulent, bankrupt online university. Additionally, under DeVos’s watch another shady for-profit college run by a megachurch, Dream Center Education Holdings, took millions in federal dollars before abruptly shutting down, leaving thousands of students tens of thousands of dollars in debt with no college degree or transferrable credits to show for it.

At Tuesday’s four-day training conference for financial aid officers, where DeVos first suggested having someone else deal with the $1.5 trillion Americans owe the government for their educations, DeVos said that an “expert and apolitical” group should manage the loans. So, basically suggesting her own department headed by someone competent. Not a terrible idea.