Last week I wrote about the incredibly poor management of e-mail retention policies in the federal government. After reviewing some of the policy and management inadequacies, and outright failures, I said it made you wonder who was running the federal government. “Who is managing it?” I asked.
An article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal on the federal government’s student loan program gives us the answer: Nobody. They can’t be managing it because they don’t really know what is going on. Here are some excerpts from the article:
“The Obama administration is unable to get basic details about student debt due to an archaic system of data collection on its $1.1 trillion student-loan portfolio, hampering the government’s ability to help distressed borrowers and protect taxpayers.
At issue is an Education Department computer system that contains data on most of the roughly 40 million Americans with student loans. The system is unable to quickly produce basic details about student debt – including whether Americans are defaulting even after having their payments lowered. It also lacks the ability to analyze data while making new loans, and officials say they don’t want to disrupt the flow of federal aid to current students.
Deputy Treasury Secretary Sarah Bloom Raskin has raised concerns about the lack of information. ‘The Treasury Department has a strong interest in making sure we are asking the right questions when we consider the number of student-loan borrowers, the amount of student loan debt outstanding, and how borrowers are faring with student loan debt over time,’ she said in a speech last year.
Currently, the government can’t easily determine, for example, how many people are enrolling in a program designed to help borrowers unable to pay their loan. … The government also can’t precisely ascertain how many of those enrolled in the program are still defaulting on their loans. …
The problems reflect the difficulties the government is encountering in its new role as the nation’s primary lender of student debt, a role it assumed in 2010. …
Some education experts say the government wasn’t adequately prepared to manage and analyze a program that was typically handled for decades by the private sector.
‘If you don’t have enough information to do this and not come out with a profit, the risks of a deficit here are huge,’ said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies federal education policy. ‘This is a pretty darn complicated task that, frankly, lots of really smart banks were doing for a long time. These guys [in the government] are not that well versed in it.’”
When I talked about management generally in last week’s post, I said that you couldn’t blame President Obama especially. This one, however, is totally his responsibility. The federal Education Department took over this program in 2010 because it wanted to. It wanted to get private companies out of the student loan program, so the government could run it.
Except that once the Education Department took over the program, it did not institute the necessary management controls and procedures to be able to see how the program was working – or whether it was working. Or how much it was costing.
The bottom line is, if we are going to have the federal government do as much as some people want it to do, we have to get better managers in the federal government to run these programs. And the politicians who want to federal government to do all these things need to actually make sure those managers are in place and do their job. Because promises without adequate follow-through are just another form of broken promises.
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