Biden's program would have canceled student loans without verifying eligibility: Audit

The Education Department approved millions of applications for President Biden’s now-defunct student loan forgiveness program without checking to make sure the borrowers were eligible, Congress’ chief watchdog said in a new report.

Two years after fraudsters stole hundreds of billions of dollars from pandemic assistance programs based on self-reporting of eligibility, the Biden administration seemed poised to make the same mistake, the Government Accountability Office concluded.

GAO said the department was ready to approve more than 2 million applications that relied on people to self-report their own incomes — the same sort of model that led to...