Today, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina M. Khan announced that an open meeting of the Commission will be held virtually on Thursday, September 19, 2024. The open meeting will commence at 11 a.m. ET and will begin with time for members of the public to address the Commission.
The Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA), operating under the name American Education Services (AES), is embroiled in a significant legal battle with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB’s lawsuit against AES centers on serious allegations concerning the management of private student loans, particularly those discharged in bankruptcy.
Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) filed a proposed order against the student loan servicer Navient for its years of failures and lawbreaking. If entered by the court, the proposed order would permanently ban the company from servicing federal Direct Loans and would forbid the company from directly servicing or acquiring most loans under the Federal Family Education Loan Program . These bans would largely remove Navient from a market where it, among other illegal actions, steered numerous student loan borrowers into costly repayment options.
Student loan payments on hold as a result of COVID-19 were due to resume in September 2023, and while borrowers who have not resumed payments are seeing interest accrue on those accounts, there has been a grace period and those accounts have not been reported as delinquent to the credit bureaus.
On June 28, in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, et al., the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron deference doctrine, a long-standing tenet of administrative law established in 1984 in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. This doctrine directed courts to defer to a government agency’s interpretation of a statute if the statute was ambiguous regarding, or simply did not address, the issue before the court, as long as the interpretation was reasonable.