Recently, the United States government made an agreement with a student loan company to allow it to keep 278 million dollars in subsidies that the United States Education Department had found improper. Under this agreement, the department will stop paying money to this loan company until an audit determines if the company is really eligible for the money or not. The name of this student loan company is Nelnet. The inspector general's office of the United States said that the accounting practices of this student loan company could have led to the overpayment. The Under Secretary of Education Sara Martinez Tucker said that it would not recover past payments from a student loan company since this might drive smaller student loan companies out of business. The current Democrats in Congress did not like this agreement with this student loan company. Congress had just approved a bill to lower interest rates on some new federal student loans and lessen lenders' guaranteed profits. Democrats think that the administration should have recovered the money from this student loan company. The administration is rewarding them for their greed. The audit by the inspector general had found that this student loan company had misused a subsidy program that had an interest rate of 9.5 percent. This guarantee was made in the 1980s, when interest rates were kept artificially high; to keep lending companies in the student loan business.