Try as they might, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress cannot disguise that they continue to do the bidding of the for-profit college industry, which has saddled working-class students — including veterans — with crushing debt while providing useless degrees, or no degrees at all.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos claimed ignorance when she was asked during a congressional hearing on Tuesday how many of the college students who told her department that they had been ripped off were complaining about for-profit schools. The widely publicized answer is more than 98 percent.

For-profit college fraud dates back to the inception of the G.I. Bill during World War II. A congressional investigation during the 1950s found that schools had cropped up to fleece veterans, siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars while providing worthless training. Since then, Congress has intermittently tightened regulations only to loosen them under industry pressure, leading to a cycle of exploitation.

The problem became so pervasive that 37 state attorneys general joined forces to combat it. Attorneys general are not only suing abusive for-profit schools, they are suing the federal government itself, resisting efforts to weaken or ignore regulations that protect students from predatory institutions.