News Clips

A few hours before House Republicans voted overwhelmingly to promote Elise Stefanik to the party’s third-ranking post—that of chair of their caucus—that very same caucus, as well as Stefanik herself, voted on a straight party line against the Comprehensive Debt Collection Improvement Act. The bill includes a provision that would protect military service members from predatory debt collection.

We spoke to two experts about what you really *need* to know about student debt, both as a political issue and as the personal issue hitting your bank account every month. Bonnie Latreille is the director of research and advocacy at the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) and has dedicated her career to protecting future and former students from predatory student loan practices.

We spend it, borrow it and save it. Now let’s talk about money and its many minefields, from credit cards to casinos, scammers to student loans.

Under President Biden, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has rescinded or scaled back a number of policies put in place by the Trump administration. And the bureau is staffing up in anticipation of taking a more active role in regulation and enforcement, as it did during the Obama administration.

Lenders could be clashing with an old nemesis soon. Richard Cordray, 62, has been named chief operating officer of federal student aid, putting him in charge of the U.S. Department of Education’s $1.6 trillion portfolio of federal student loans.

Cordray led the bureau’s crackdown on consumer abuses in debt collection, student loan servicing and for-profit colleges, garnering the respect of advocates and drawing the ire of those industries. His selection signals tougher oversight of the Education Department’s contractors and enforcement of the rules governing federal student aid.

Richard Cordray, a close ally of Senator Elizabeth Warren who served as the first director of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Obama years, has been selected as the new head of federal student aid in the Biden administration, a post that will put him at the center of the swirling debate over forgiving student debt.

Now, advocates are calling on the U.S. Department of Education to more aggressively monitor these arrangements after years of evidence that the current approach to the rules isn’t doing enough to protect students from potentially harmful financial products.