Tag Archives: Education Secretary Linda McMahon

Student Loans For Dead People

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If the government continues to give away millions of dollars to dead people, some of us are going to start declaring ourselves dead!

On Monday, The Daily Signal posted an article about the number of student loans being given to dead people.

The article reports:

The Trump administration is fixing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid program after uncovering around $1 billion in fraud, according to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

“We have identified and saved about a billion dollars for FAFSA loans that would’ve been fraudulent,” McMahon told The Daily Signal in an exclusive interview.

The Biden administration only required identity verification for less than 1% of students applying for student loans, McMahon claimed.

“There were dead people who were applying for loans and receiving them, bots who were receiving, and we identified in Minnesota several thousands of these bots,” she said.

The Trump administration found about $90 million in federal student aid was fraudulently disbursed.

This includes more than $30 million given to deceased individuals and more than $40 million distributed to companies using bots disguised as fake students. 

McMahon said the agency has “totally revamped” FAFSA.

The article concludes:

While improving the FAFSA portal, the Education Department discovered the widespread fraud.

The agency launched an identity verification effort in June, and it found about 150,000 suspect identities in current FAFSA forms just within the first week.

The department announced in December it is hiring a new fraud detection team.

“We already have the team in place,” McMahon said. “We are working—it’s been amazing what we have discovered.”

“I’m very pleased with the results,” she continued, “so I think they’ve got a good team in place, and I think they’re doing a really good job.”

I am glad that this is being cleaned up, but I am tired of constantly hearing about fraud in government programs and having no one held accountable. Who received the money, and why are they not in jail?

Should We Forgive The Student Loans Of People Who Don’t Exist?

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On Tuesday, The Federalist posted an article about another scandal in Minnesota involving government funds.

The article reports:

In Minnesota, home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in the U.S. and the site of numerous fraud investigations, fraudsters received $12.5 million in student loan and education grant money, according to a letter Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

The letter calls on Walz to resign, and states that a new fraud prevention system at the department has found over $1 billion in “attempted financial aid theft,” including by international fraud rings and artificial intelligence (AI) bots.

“[Y]our careless lack of oversight and abuse of the welfare system has attracted fraudsters from around the world, especially from Somalia, to establish a beachhead of criminality in our country,” McMahon wrote. “As President Trump put it, you have turned Minnesota into a ‘fraudulent hub of money laundering activity.’”

It is disturbing to me that international bad actors are taking advantage of the lack of accountability in spending American taxpayer money.

The article concludes:

In June, the Department of Education announced a “nationwide effort to eliminate identity theft and fraud in the federal student aid programs for the fall 2025 semester,” and a requirement for institutions of higher education to verify “certain first-time applicants who are enrolled in the summer term,” as an immediate effort to combat fraud.

“Federal Student Aid (FSA) data indicates that the rate of fraud through stolen identities, particularly involving technologically advanced fraud rings, has reached a level that imperils the federal student assistance programs,” the department stated at the time.

Another obvious safeguard, also announced by the Education Department in June, required first-time student aid applicants to “present, either in person or on a live video conference, an unexpired, valid, government-issued photo identification to an institutionally authorized individual and the institution must preserve a copy of this documentation.”

As the department has noted, the Biden administration removed verification capabilities for student loans and “diverted resources from fraud prevention toward its illegal loan forgiveness efforts,” opening the door for massive fraud.

I think it is time to turn the student loan program back to the states and back to private banks. I suspect that will end a lot of the fraud. Private business will always do a better job than the government. Note that it is the people from private industry put in place by President Trump that are finding the fraud.