Are the rats fleeing Joe Biden's sinking ship now?

Joe Biden is losing a signature lieutenant, Richard Cordray, the guy who runs all his student loan shovel-outs and 'forgiveness' programs. He's quitting in June, in what's officially the end of his three-year term, not wanting another.

According to Politico:

Rich Cordray, the Biden administration’s top student loan official who has been a key ally of progressives pushing for debt relief, will leave the Education Department at the end of June, the agency confirmed on Friday.

Cordray’s departure comes as the administration has been scrambling to recover from its troubled rollout of a new student aid system that delayed college financial aid offers for millions of families this spring and drew bipartisan criticism in Congress.

It's an odd departure, given that it leaves his successor just six months to clean up his agency before a new administration takes over. Lucky DEI hire.

Politico noted that it was his agency that was behind the FAFSA student aid bunglings.

Most controversial, however, was Cordray’s leadership of the Office for Federal Student Aid amid its disastrous implementation of a bipartisan overhaul of the federal financial aid process that Congress passed in the waning days of the Trump administration.

The new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, was meant to provide a simpler, easier experience for millions of families. But the years-long technology project was months behind schedule and failed to work when it launched earlier this year.

The Education Department for months could not process millions of federal financial aid applications and is in the process of re-processing millions more that were processed incorrectly.

Politico noted that congressional Republicans (to their credit) were angry at the botch-up because Cordray's agency was so focused on granting student loand debt forgiveness it never got around to doing its job competently in processing incoming students' applications for financial aid.

I know young people who were affected by this screw-up -- they couldn't tell whether they could enroll in a school they'd been accepted at or not because the FAFSA botch was so extensive.

What an interesting thing that this illegal focus on student aid "debt forgiveness" actually spilled over into the quest of legitimate students to get their financial aid in order to go to those overpriced schools, creating huge backups, and universities extending their deadlines. I know university administrators who said this was a major hassle for them, too.

It seems that for all the brownie points Biden is getting over student aid "forgiveness," and making the lives of the upper middle classes easier, the flip side was that he made life harder for all the young people coming into the system with that FAFSA blunder. Maybe that's why polls are showing that Biden is losing the youth vote. You can bet young people are talking about this to each other.

And sure enough, Cordray has a history of being on the forefront of failed and overreaching federal programs. Not too long ago, he ran President Obama's Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, an agency of unaccountable power. Now he's gotten involved with this.

That he's leaving is the most interesting thing of all, given the legal challenges to most of Biden's debt forgiveness schemes coming up, as well as the FAFSA mess-up. Can it be that Cordray, a political animal if there ever was one, might be reading the tea leaves and want to get out while the getting out is good?

Maybe the rats are starting to flee the sinking ship of Biden now, which means we ought to watch for more of them.

Image: Photoshop montage by Monica Showalter, assembled from public domain sources.