The department announced on Wednesday its proposal to significantly dial back the borrower-defense rule, raising the bar that students have to meet to receive debt relief. “The regulations proposed,” DeVos said in a news release, lay out “clear rules of the road for higher education institutions to follow and [hold] institutions, rather than hardworking taxpayers, accountable for making whole those students who were harmed by an institution’s deceptive practices.”

Borrower advocates weren’t sold on the change. And their fears were once again piqued on Thursday night when The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that, instead of rewriting the gainful-employment rule, the Education Department planned to eliminate it altogether.

“These are two of the highest-priority rules for the advocates, and their nightmare would have been that borrower defense becomes entirely unusable and gainful employment no longer exists,” Clare McCann, a policy analyst at New America, told me. “And that seems like where we are headed right now.”

But the news wasn’t exactly a surprise. Higher-education observers assumed that the department would be taking a fresh look at the Obama-era regulations, which for-profit colleges have called overly burdensome, and which they have fought to eliminate. Changing these rules was one of the first agenda items for some officials in the Trump administration.

Taylor Hansen was one of those officials interested in rolling back the regulations. He was a member of the “beachhead” team—paid temporary appointees who help get the government up and running and who do not require Senate confirmation—at the department at the beginning of the Trump administration. According to emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the left-leaning think tank The Century Foundation and shared with me, Hansen, who formerly worked as a lobbyist for the largest trade group representing for-profit colleges, Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), set to work immediately. He scheduled meetings to discuss the regulations with top officials in the department. (Hansen, who resigned in March 2017, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Since gainful employment is a hot button item it may be good to discuss that as one of the items—if possible,” he told Colleen McGinnis, the chief of staff at the Federal Student Aid office, in one email on February 14, 2017, seven days after DeVos’s confirmation. A day later Hansen told Michael Dakduk, a senior official at CECU, that he would pass along a letter from the CECU president and CEO, Steve Gunderson, requesting a meeting with the new secretary.

In an email, Gunderson confirmed that CECU reached out to people at the department, but insisted that all of their interactions were "aboveboard, transparent, and in line with all ethical requirements." He added that the organization has not met with Secretary DeVos.