On student loans, the hits keep coming
By
Betsy DeVos
March 12, 2024 6:00 am
President Joe Biden’s illegal student loan “forgiveness” is exorbitant, costing taxpayers another $1.2 billion in just the past few weeks. In sum, it is likely to be the most expensive set of unsanctioned actions the administrative state has ever taken, costing more than half a trillion dollars in unappropriated, unapproved spending.
The costs don’t stop there. A looming human cost may be even higher — one generated by the universal incompetence of those running the Department of Education.
Every family knows the only way to access student loans and grants is through filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which the Education Department administers. What many parents don’t know is that right now the Education Department cannot process FAFSAs, and more troubling, it cannot say with any certainty when it will be able to do so. That means students won’t know how much aid they qualify to receive until after the normal college enrollment decision deadline.
It’s a failure so significant even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and more than 100 of his Democratic colleagues in Congress have expressed their dismay about the situation.
Hitting FAFSA deadlines is an annual and relied-upon task, much like Social Security getting payments out the door. It simply has to happen.
So why isn’t it happening this year? Almost certainly because of the Biden administration’s obsessive focus on implementing politically motivated student debt schemes, in spite of being told not to, quite forcefully, by the Supreme Court. Education officials claim they are “resource-constrained,” but that’s nonsense. They’ve simply redeployed staffers who should be working on the FAFSA to work instead on “forgiving” student loans.
This is wholly avoidable and flatly unacceptable.
more
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/2913899/on-student-loans-the-hits-keep-coming/
