It might just be career government lawyers doing their jobs, and doing them well, until the Trump Administration can catch up and work its malevolence, but in court papers filed today, the Trump Justice Department defended the Obama Administration’s gainful employment rule, a measure aimed at curbing predatory abuses by for-profit colleges. The rule penalizes expensive career college programs that, year after year, leave graduates with debts that, based on their earnings, they cannot afford to repay. “The public interest is served by allowing the Department to go forward with implementing the GE regulations,” Justice Department lawyers wrote on behalf of their client, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who is being sued by an association of cosmetology schools. The association’s somewhat risque argument is that many hairdressers and other beauty professionals do not report all their tip income to the IRS, and thus their graduates actually are doing better than the gainful employment calculations give them credit for. Revised under pressure from industry lobbyists, the Obama Administration’s rule is not very strong, but it does endanger some of the worst-of-the-worst college programs. The operators of those programs, who have been raking in billions in taxpayer money, want to make sure they can still act with impunity, even though their abuses have ruined the lives of countless veterans, single moms, and other students. There are good cosmetology schools, as well as other types of career schools. The gainful employment rule aims to channel resources and students to those quality, affordable schools, and away from the kind of for-profit colleges that law enforcement agencies are investigating or prosecuting for fraud. But given: that Donald Trump was previously the proprietor of his own predatory for-profit real estate “university”; that Trump crony Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans have aggressively advocated for the for-profit college industry; that DeVos has been invested in for-profit education