Trump Administration Considers Moving Student Loans from Education Department to Treasury -<br />By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG, STACY COWLEY and PATRICIA COHENMAY 25, 2017<br />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<br />that would radically change the system that helps 43 million students finance higher education.<br />“The reason the federal student aid programs live within the Education Department is because that’s the agency<br />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.<br />“The Education Department is a policy shop with a trillion-dollar bank on the side,” said Rohit Chopra, a former student<br />loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who also briefly worked for the Education Department.<br />In his resignation memo, a copy of which was obtained by , Mr. Runcie said<br />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.<br />A shift in handling federal student aid is being weighed as the Trump administration and Ms. DeVos consider overhauling the Department of Education.<br />“Moving the agency that is supposed to provide stewardship for student loan borrowers to an agency<br />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.
