Congress Grills Spellings Over Education Department Scandals

Will Margaret Spellings be the next Bush Cabinet secretary to fall? That's the implication of this account of her congressional testimony yesterday, from Inside Higher Ed:

Defiant where others might have been contrite, Margaret Spellings largely defended the Education Department’s handling in recent years of perceived wrongdoing in the federal student loan programs at a House of Representatives hearing on Thursday. Her defense did not go over well with the House panel’s Democratic leaders, who subjected the education secretary to intense and sometimes hostile questioning.

It’s possible that nothing Spellings might have said could have produced a different outcome; the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), has been stepping up his criticism of the department’s oversight of the loan programs in recent weeks, and his opening statement — written, obviously, before Spellings uttered a word — asked whether the department’s “monumental ... oversight failures” represented “simply laziness,” “incompetence,” “a deliberate decision to look the other way,” or “a failing more sinister than that?” Not exactly a tone suggesting that Miller and other Democrats were looking for a way to make nice with the secretary.

Even so, Spellings’s stance — vowing to work with lawmakers to fix the problems going forward, but insisting that the department had done pretty much all it could in the past — almost seemed designed to turn up the antagonism level in the room. It certainly had that effect.