THE TRUMP administration rejected a website that the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office designed to help students who have been defrauded by their colleges apply for loan forgiveness, arguing the tool made the process too easy, according to a whistleblower complaint.

The development of the website was part of a $90 million federal contract to build one main hub for all federal student aid needs that modernized existing loan servicing portals and made them more user-friendly – in the same way that the application for federal student aid was recently redesigned and streamlined to make it easier for students to apply.

As part of the larger redesign, staff at the Federal Student Aid office, all of whom are career officers and not political appointees, were tasked with developing a website that would allow students to apply for what’s known as borrower defense – a process by which students whose colleges mislead them about things like job placement rates, average earnings post-graduation and the transferability of credits to apply for some or all of their debt to be forgiven.

The Trump administration recently rewrote the borrower defense rule and the new website was supposed to reflect the changes to the rule as well as streamline the application process so that claims could be processed more easily. As it stands, the Education Department has a backlog of roughly 200,000 claims.

But problems arose in late February, the whistleblower says, just days before the country went into lockdown to stem the spread of the coronavirus, when Diane Auer Jones, principal deputy undersecretary at the Education Department, asked to meet with the team in charge of developing the new borrower defense website and instantly pushed back on some of the more user-friendly features of the site. That’s when the whistleblower, a career staffer who was involved in the development of the website, first lodged a complaint with the Office of Inspector General, noting that Jones, who is a political appointee, was not respecting the firewall that’s supposed to exist between the Education Department and the Federal Student Aid office.

Jones, who the whistleblower says was unhappy with the prompts the smart application would ask of borrowers and said it provided them with too much information, told the team it didn’t match the vision she had for the borrower defense policy. Two weeks ago, Jones told the Federal Student Aid team that it could not launch the website, effectively killing it. That’s when the whistleblower filed the second complaint with the Office of Inspector General.

According to the whistleblower, Jones said the website provided borrowers with too much information and ordered staff at the Federal Student Aid office to scrap it entirely.