School scammers are robbing veterans and the government blind

The Hill

14-05-2025

The GI Bill is more than an education benefit — it is a promise from the American people to veterans. It reflects a national commitment that those who serve our country in uniform have the opportunity to acquire the skills and education they need to pursue a successful civilian career after leaving the military.
I have worked with veterans for more than a decade. No veteran has said, 'I hope I throw away my GI Bill on a school that leads nowhere.' Yet this is what many veterans face when they unwittingly enroll in a fraudulent school. By the time they realize the scam, their benefits are gone and the damage is done.
This should alarm every American, as it represents the epitome of government fraud, waste and abuse. The team at Veterans Education Success, where I work, obtained documents through open records laws to determine exactly how veterans were defrauded by criminals now in jail, while the government officials who were supposed to protect veterans and the taxpayers' investment looked the other way.
We found active failures and detail them in new reports. Taxpayers deserve answers, and veterans deserve far better.
Not long ago, the Department of Justice seized the bank accounts of the 'House of Prayer Christian Church,' which students and teachers described as being an actual cult, as we reported to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Despite credible complaints and news media coverage, the school kept receiving GI Bill funds for two more years — and even a full three months after the FBI raided the school's 'campuses' across the country. Our new report details the government oversight failures that led to this fiasco.
Another equally troubling case involved Retail Ready Career Center, a school that defrauded veterans of more than $70 million. The school's owner, Jonathan Dean Davis, was convicted and sentenced to 19 years in federal prison. He used veterans' education benefits to pay for a Lamborghini, property and other personal expenses — all while his school remained VA-approved.
Documents we uncovered show that the government failed to heed obvious red flags, including an employee's receipt of gifts from Davis. As with the House of Prayer, veterans complained, but the VA didn't provide those complaints to its state agent, the State Approving Agency, until the FBI raided the school. Once again, veterans paid the price.
These are not isolated incidents, but the result of a system that has grown too lax in enforcing the high standards that should be expected of schools that seek the benefits that veterans earned through service. A third report we are releasing details how the VA has failed to police its employees' and state agents' conflicts of interest with schools seeking GI Bill funds.
Through our Freedom of Information Act requests, we learned that the VA has waived federal conflicts laws for hundreds of its employees, not denying a single such request. This includes employees who oversee the GI Bill, where such conflicts obviously pose the greatest risk. Moreover, the VA relies exclusively on employees' self-attestations that they are not accepting bribes — a laughable proposition, given that self-attestation never uncovered past bribery of VA employees by for-profit schools.
These cases represent a betrayal of trust. Veterans use the GI Bill because they believe it is a pathway to something better. They reasonably believe that if the VA approves an academic program, that program must be legitimate. Yet we hear this same question over and over: 'Why was this program approved in the first place?'
Congress has tried to plug some of the holes, and the House and Senate Veterans' Affairs committees have held hearings and proposed legislative fixes. Some of those changes have helped. But these cases show just how far the VA still is from achieving basic accountability. It should not take a federal raid or criminal convictions to stop GI Bill money from flowing to bad actors in the system.
In addition to true accountability, there need to be real consequences when things go wrong. Right now, veterans who were defrauded lose their benefits and have no way to get them restored. That is simply unacceptable.
Fortunately, these problems are fixable. We can raise the standards for approving schools so that phony schools like this are not approved in the first place. Congress can give veterans a clear path to restore their benefits when they have been defrauded. This should be common sense to anyone who has ever thanked a veteran for their service.
Veterans are not asking for special treatment. They are merely asking for the government to keep its side of the deal.
William Hubbard, a Marine Corps veteran, is the vice president for veterans and military policy at Veterans Education Success.