Trump’s Education Department Shocks with Support of Biden’s Financial Value Transparency and Gainful Employment Rule
Aaron D. Lacey and Lorrie Hargrove
May 21, 2025
In what many will deem a surprising turn of events (to say the least), the Trump Administration’s U.S. Department of Education (“ED”) revealed late last week that it intends to defend the Biden Administration’s Financial Value Transparency and Gainful Employment Rule (“GE Rule”), notwithstanding the fact that the first Trump administration stripped a very similar rule from the books in 2019, observing at the time that:
“the GE regulations rely on a debt-to-earnings (D/E) rates formula that is fundamentally flawed and inconsistent with the requirements of currently available student loan repayment programs, fails to properly account for factors other than institutional or program quality that directly influence student earnings and other outcomes, fails to provide transparency regarding program-level debt and earnings outcomes for all academic programs, and wrongfully targets some academic programs and institutions while ignoring other programs that may result in lesser outcomes and higher student debt.” 84 Fed. Reg. 31392 (July 1, 2019).
