When Congress authorized the Department of Education to overhaul the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in 2020, few could have predicted just how terribly the incoming Biden administration would botch it. Of course, few then could have known that the president would pack the agency with longtime loyalist bureaucrats or that those cronies would use their authority to force through their decadelong aspirations of massive student debt cancellation.
The FAFSA rewrite was meant to “streamline the application” and “make the student aid process more predictable for low-income students.” Instead, Biden’s Department of Education has done the opposite. Its failed rollout, which, even after being delayed a year, has been a slow-motion disaster, has prevented hundreds of thousands of high school graduates from committing to colleges or knowing whether they can afford it if they do.
