The Department of Veterans Affairs is pushing to suspend a 50-year-old ethics law that prevents employees from receiving money or owning a stake in for-profit colleges that pocket hundreds of millions of dollars in tuition paid through the G.I. Bill of Rights.

The agency says the conflict-of-interest law — enacted after scandals enveloped the for-profit education industry — is now redundant and outdated, with “illogical and unintended consequences” affecting employees who have no real conflict of interest, such as a V.A. doctor teaching a course at a school attended by veterans with educational benefits.

But veterans’ groups and ethics experts reject those arguments and say the department is abandoning protections for veterans and taxpayers. They worry that the effort is part of a larger rollback of federal safeguards that were instituted before President Trump took office to combat abuses and fraud by for-profit colleges.

Several officials who worked in the for-profit college industry and had criticized the Obama-era crackdown as excessive, for example, have joined the Education Department, which administers and polices the federal student loan program and the industry.