The Obama administration sought to replace this labyrinthine system with a single entry point — a sea change in how student loan servicing would work. Instead of dealing directly with private vendors, all federal borrowers would gain access to their accounts through an Education Department portal, with standardized forms and processes. A single vendor would take the lead in creating the system’s interface
.. In October, the government narrowed the field to three finalists
- Navient; the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (better known as FedLoan);
- Nelnet
- Great Lakes
.. The winner was to be announced in February.
.. Navient is the biggest lightning rod. In January, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and two state attorneys general sued Navient, charging it with a long list of misdeeds.
.. a particular piece of guidance from the Obama administration she struck down:
- that the Education Department should place great weight on a company’s track record when selecting student loan vendors, and should steer away from companies with histories of shoddy service or other problems.
.. that puts Navient — the nation’s largest federal student loan servicer ..
on stronger footing than it had been in bidding for agency contracts.
.. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau responded ..
borrowers “should be able to repay their debt without having to deal with illegal loan servicing practices.”
.. Navient’s size makes it a very strong competitor — once past performance is played down.
.. The loan servicer has tremendous power to guide them through repayment options. Some plans stretch payment periods out for as long as 30 years, and others help qualifying students get a portion of their debt forgiven. Strategic use of those paths can trim — or inflate — the sum that a student ultimately pays by tens of thousands of dollars.
Gorsuch’s big fat lie
With a shrewdly calculated innocence, Judge Neil Gorsuch told a big fat lie at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Because it was a lie everyone expected, nobody called it that.
“There’s no such thing as a Republican judge or a Democratic judge,” Gorsuch said.
.. We now have an ideological judiciary. To pretend otherwise is naive and also recklessly irresponsible because it tries to wish away the real stakes in confirmation battles.
.. party polarization now affects the behavior of judges, “reducing the likelihood that they will stray from the ideological positions that brought them to the Court in the first place.
.. If partisanship and ideology were not central to Supreme Court nominations, Gorsuch would be looking at more years in his beloved Colorado.
.. conservatives who regularly denounce “liberal judicial activism” now count on control of the Supreme Court to get results they could never achieve through the democratically elected branches of government.
.. They could not gut the Voting Rights Act in Congress. So Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s court did it for them. They could never have undone a century’s worth of legislation limiting big money’s influence on politics. So the Citizens United decision did it for them.
.. Gorsuch has done what economic conservatives count on the judges they push onto the courts to do: He regularly sides with corporations over workers and consumers. We can’t know exactly where the millions of dollars of dark money fueling pro-Gorsuch ad campaigns come from, but we have a right to guess.
.. it appears that the prior relatively pro-business conservative trajectory of the Supreme Court will now be restored.”
.. The nominee himself flicked away White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’s declaration to the Conservative Political Action Conference that Gorsuch “represents the type of judge that has the vision of Donald Trump and it fulfills the promise that he made to all of you.”
.. conservatives, including Trump, want the court to sweep aside decades of jurisprudence that gave Congress broad authority to legislate civil rights and social reform, along with environmental, worker and consumer protections. Gorsuch good-naturedly evaded nearly every substantive question he was asked because he could not acknowledge that this is why he was there.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Fights to Stay Alive Under Trump
While the future of the CFPB remains cloudy, Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, hinted it may, at the very least, need an overhaul.
.. “The biggest issue I have with the CFPB, I don’t believe they should be funded out of profits from the Federal Reserve. I think they should be funded out of an appropriations process.”
.. Mierzwinski scoffed at Mnuchin’s idea; “That is code for I want to kill the CFPB,” he said. For Warren, a funding shift would give the big banks more power. “The CFPB gets an independent source of funding – like every other federal banking agency in U.S. history – so that it can hold banks like Wells Fargo accountable without fearing budget cuts from big bank allies in Congress. If Mr. Mnuchin and others push to change the consumer agency’s funding source, they will be declaring loud and clear that they care more about pleasing big banks than protecting working families and the safety of our financial system,” she said in a statement to FOX Business.
.. Last year, the CFPB levied a record $185 millionOpens a New Window. fine against Wells Fargo (WFC) for creating upwards of two million phony customer accounts to allegedly meet sales goals. Prior to the fine, in 2013, the Los Angeles TimesOpens a New Window.reported the practices.
Critics Look for Opening to Fire Head of the CFPB
Richard Cordray is disliked by many for helping build the agency into an aggressive financial regulator
.. A battle is intensifying over the future of Richard Cordray, the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as Republicans search for any past transgressions that would allow President-elect Donald Trump to fire him.Mr. Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general, is admired by consumer groups and disliked by many GOP lawmakers and financial-industry players for helping build the five-year-old agency into an aggressive financial regulator.
.. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R., Texas), who has led the attack on the CFPB at the House Financial Services Committee, said Mr. Trump’s transition team would study Mr. Cordray’s performance.
.. Mr. Neugebauer, who is seen as a candidate to succeed Mr. Cordray as the next CFPB chief, citing issues such as the alleged pay discrimination and the costs of renovating the agency’s Washington headquarters.
.. Republican lawmakers have a long list of steps aimed at overhauling the CFPB, including turning it into a commission, giving Congress control over its budget and reducing employee compensation by changing its pay scale. Such steps are included in a broad deregulation bill introduced this year by Rep. Jeb Hensarling
.. They added that any attempt to weaken the bureau and undermine its leadership would “risk severe impacts on our communities—including communities of color and low-income families who are most vulnerable to financial abuse.”