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- Former CFPB head Richard Cordray will lead the Federal Student Aid office, which oversees student debt.
- Elizabeth Warren helped create the CFPB and was key in nominating Cordray when she couldn't helm the agency.
- Warren wants to cancel $50,000 in student debt per person and Cordray has shared her agenda for much of his political career.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Since she was elected to the Senate almost a decade ago, Elizabeth Warren has been fighting to cancel student debt and hold loan servicers accountable. Now one of her closest allies is in charge of the federal student debt pile, and that could be a big deal.
Richard Cordray, the former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), was selected to head the Education Department's Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) on Monday. Few people in Washington DC are better placed to carry out Warren's vision of mass student-debt relief. That's because Cordray took the job Democrats wanted Warren to have.
When Warren was a Harvard professor (and occasional blogger), she frequently cited problems within the student-loan system and the need to create something like the CFPB, which would protect consumers financially and ensures they are being treated fairly. That turned into a new federal agency created under President Barack Obama, who wanted Warren to lead it, but in 2011, Senate Republicans blocked her appointment. She ran for Senate instead, becoming a national figure, while Cordray became a close ally as the first head of the CFPB.
During her time in the Senate, Warren worked with Cordray's bureau to conduct investigations into predatory lending practices. Now as head of the FSA, Cordray will be tasked with overseeing the government's $1.5 trillion student loan portfolio through disbursing loans and grants, along with monitoring student-loan servicers and implementing relief and repayment programs.
"@RichCordray was a fearless @CFPB leader who forced big financial institutions to return $12 billion to people they cheated," Warren wrote on Twitter on Monday. "I'm very glad he'll be protecting student borrowers and bringing much-needed accountability to the federal student loan program."
John Minchillo/ AP
What Cordray could do on student debt
In a statement after his appointment was announced, Cordray said he was looking forward to creating "more pathways for students to graduate and get ahead, not be burdened by insurmountable debt."
He will be tasked with sorting through claims from thousands of defrauded borrowers who filed for debt relief, along with ensuring the smooth implementation of loan collections once the pause on student loan payments through September is lifted - although Cardona said on Monday that extending the payment pause is "not out of the question."
While Cordray has not yet commented on wiping out $50,000 in student debt for each borrower, which Democrats continue to call for, he told MarketWatch last year that under the Biden administration, he expected the CFPB and the Education Department to work more closely on student-loan issues.
At the CFPB during the Obama years, Cordray made oversight of student loan servicers his priority. The agency has returned more than $75o million to student loan borrowers since 2011 over debt collection complaints, and in early 2017, the bureau sued Navient, the largest student loan servicer in the US, in a lawsuit that is still ongoing, arguing that Navient misled students into taking on loans they cannot pay off.
At a late April hearing, Warren called for the government to fire Navient, and for Navient to fire its chief executive officer, after accusing Navient for over a decade of abusing the student loan system.
In 2019, Cordray wrote a guest essay in The Plain Dealer, an Ohio newspaper, speaking out against for-profit colleges. "I hate how these hollowed-out businesses and subpar colleges are cheating consumers, employees and whole communities," Cordray wrote.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has already canceled some debt for borrowers defrauded by for-profit schools, and Warren has conducted numerous investigations into the failures of the for-profits Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institutes.
The FSA head's seat has been vacant since March, when Mark Brown, former head of the office appointed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in 2019, resigned amid pressure from labor groups and lawmakers. Warren wrote in a tweet that his resignation was "good for student borrowers."
Cordray told Marketwatch in November that, as CFPB head, his approach with the Education Department had been one of "close cooperation" but "that was all nixed when Betsy DeVos came into office." Speaking of the outlook for a Biden administration, he said he thought the CFPB and Education Department would likely go back to working closely together.