Category: Maximus

  • Is the Federal Trade Commission FOIA program still in operation?

    Is the Federal Trade Commission FOIA program still in operation?

    In light of recent developments at the Federal Trade Commission under the current administration — including staffing reductions and a temporary 2025 government shutdown — many observers and researchers are questioning whether the FTC’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) program is still functioning. The answer remains: yes — the FOIA program is still formally operational, but its capacity and responsiveness appear diminished under current conditions.

    The FTC continues to administer FOIA through its Office of General Counsel (OGC), which processes all FOIA requests. As of the 2024 fiscal year, the FTC’s FOIA Unit comprised four attorneys, five government-information specialists, and one paralegal, with occasional support from contractors and other staff. In that year, the agency processed 1,919 requests (and 29 appeals), up from 1,812 in 2023. The agency’s publicly available “FOIA Handbook,” last updated in April 2025, continues to outline how requests should be submitted, what records are on the public record, and how exemptions are applied.

    The FTC’s website still provides instructions for submitting a FOIA request via its online portal, email, fax, or mail. That means requests remain legally eligible — including those related to for-profit colleges, student loan servicers, institutional behavior, complaints, or decision-making memos.

    However, HEI’s own experience in 2025 highlights some of the challenges with the FTC’s current FOIA responsiveness. In January 2025, we submitted a FOIA request asking for a record of complaints against the University of Phoenix. Beyond an automated message, there was no response. In August 2025, we submitted another FOIA request asking for complaints against a company that dealt with student loans; in that case, not even an automated acknowledgment was received. On November 30, 2025, we received an automated response to our FOIA request about AidVantage, a student loan servicer and subsidiary of Maximus. While we did receive a reply, it reflected a stale message stating they would respond after the government reopened — even though the government had reopened on November 13.

    These examples illustrate that while FOIA is formally operational, actual responsiveness has deteriorated. For years, HEI had a good relationship with the FTC, obtaining critical information for a number of investigations in a timely manner. It remains to be seen whether that reliability can be restored.

    Compounding the issue are broader staffing and operational changes at the FTC. In testimony before Congress in May 2025, FTC Chair Andrew N. Ferguson reported that the agency began FY 2025 with about 1,315 personnel but had reduced to 1,221 full-time staff, with plans to potentially reduce further to around 1,100 — the lowest level in a decade. These staffing reductions coincide with scaled-back discretionary activities, such as rulemaking, public guidance publishing, and outreach. During the October 2025 lapse in government funding, the FTC announced that FOIA requests could still be submitted but would not be processed until appropriations resumed.

    For researchers, journalists, and advocates — including those pursuing records related to for-profit colleges, student loan servicers, regulatory decisions, or historical investigations — FOIA remains a legally viable tool. The path is open, though response times are slower, staff resources are constrained, and releases may be more limited, especially for sensitive or exempt material.

    Sources

    Congressional budget testimony on FTC staffing and budget: https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118225/witnesses/HHRG-119-AP23-Wstate-FergusonA-20250515.pdf

    FTC FOIA Handbook (April 2025): https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/FOIA-Handbook-April-2025.pdf

    FTC 2024 Chief FOIA Officer Report (staffing, request volume): https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/chief-foia-officer-report-fy2024.pdf

    FTC website instructions for submitting FOIA requests: https://www.ftc.gov/foia/make-foia-request

    FTC 2025 shutdown plan showing FOIA processing paused during funding lapse: https://www.ftc.gov/ftc-is-closed

    Reporting on FTC removal of business-guidance blogs in 2025: https://www.wired.com/story/federal-trade-commission-removed-blogs-critical-of-ai-amazon-microsoft/

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  • The Right-Wing Roots of EdTech

    The Right-Wing Roots of EdTech

    The modern EdTech industry is often portrayed as a neutral, innovative force, but its origins are deeply political. Its growth has been fueled by a fusion of neoliberal economics, right-wing techno-utopianism, patriarchy, and classism, reinforced by racialized inequality. One of the key intellectual architects of this vision was George Gilder, a conservative supply-side evangelist whose work glorified technology and markets as liberating forces. His influence helped pave the way for the “Gilder Effect”: a reshaping of education into a market where technology, finance, and ideology collide, often at the expense of marginalized students and workers.

    The for-profit college boom provides the clearest demonstration of how the Gilder Effect operates. John Sperling’s University of Phoenix, later run by executives like Todd Nelson, was engineered as a credential factory, funded by federal student aid and Wall Street. Its model was then exported across the sector, including Risepoint (formerly Academic Partnerships), a company that sold universities on revenue-sharing deals for online programs. These ventures disproportionately targeted working-class women, single mothers, military veterans, and Black and Latino students. The model was not accidental—it was designed to exploit populations with the least generational wealth and the most limited alternatives. Here, patriarchy, classism, and racism intersected: students from marginalized backgrounds were marketed promises of upward mobility but instead left with debt, unstable credentials, and limited job prospects.

    Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn of Harvard Business School popularized the concept of “disruption,” providing a respectable academic justification for dismantling public higher education. Their theory of disruptive innovation framed traditional universities as outdated and made way for venture-capital-backed intermediaries. Yet this rhetoric concealed a brutal truth: disruption worked not by empowering the disadvantaged but by extracting value from them, often reinforcing existing inequalities of race, gender, and class.

    The rise and collapse of 2U shows how this ideology plays out. Founded in 2008, 2U promised to bring elite universities online, selling the dream of access to graduate degrees for working professionals. Its “flywheel effect” growth strategy relied on massive enrollment expansion and unsustainable spending. Despite raising billions, the company never turned a profit. Its high-profile acquisition of edX from Harvard and MIT only deepened its financial instability. When 2U filed for bankruptcy, it was not simply a corporate failure—it was a symptom of an entire system built on hype and dispossession.

    2U also became notorious for its workplace practices. In 2015, it faced a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit after firing an enrollment director who disclosed her pregnancy. Women workers, especially mothers, were treated as expendable, a reflection of patriarchal corporate norms. Meanwhile, many front-line employees—disproportionately women and people of color—faced surveillance, low wages, and impossible sales quotas. Here the intersections of race, gender, and class were not incidental but central to the business model. The company extracted labor from marginalized workers while selling an educational dream to marginalized students, creating a cycle of exploitation at both ends of the pipeline.

    Financialization extended these dynamics. Lenders like Sallie Mae and Navient, and servicers like Maximus, turned students into streams of revenue, with Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) trading debt obligations on Wall Street. Universities, including Purdue Global and University of Arizona Global, rebranded failing for-profits as “public” ventures, but their revenue-driven practices remained intact. These arrangements consistently offloaded risk onto working-class students, especially women and students of color, while enriching executives and investors.

    The Gilder Effect, then, is not just about technology or efficiency. It is about reshaping higher education into a site of extraction, where the burdens of debt and labor fall hardest on those already disadvantaged by patriarchy, classism, and racism. Intersectionality reveals what the industry’s boosters obscure: EdTech has not democratized education but has deepened inequality. The failure of 2U and the persistence of predatory for-profit models are not accidents—they are the logical outcome of an ideological project rooted in conservative economics and systemic oppression.

    Sources

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