"Your story 'Student Loans Caught in Dispute' overstates an issue between Sallie Mae and the Education Department," writes Sallie Mae CEO Al Lord to the editors of The Wall Street Journal. "You correctly report that we protested the department's sole sourcing of a loan-servicing contract, a contract we would like at least the opportunity to bid. We haven't even begun those discussions, yet your newspaper alleges a disagreement so consequential as to threaten loan delivery. In fact, this issue will have no impact on student-loan originations. We intend to aggressively pursue the servicing contract at issue. We have earned the servicing business of our 10 million American student borrowers. We have been down this road before. In 2001, we asked the department to competitively bid the government's direct student-loan servicing contract. It bid that contract after a similar and successful protest. We lost that competition, but by the department's own reckoning at the time, the competitive process saved the taxpayers $1 billion."