It clearly says you need to have had the loan for 10 years and been paying on time payments and have a stable job. Those requirements don't seem absurd, outlandish, nor designed to make people fail.
If you don't meet those minimum of requirements, why would the tax payer want to forgive your debts - you clearly didn't hold your end of the bargain, yet want to be released of potentially thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of public-money debt.
Or talked with customer support agents for the program that who told my wife that a formal loan forgiveness application was not required, and would be a waste of time. Just meet the criteria and apply when your 10 years were up.
But what those criteria were was not described clearly enough to make 10 year plans on. And the general confusion was so massive, the program so obviously a shambles, that we decided there was little chance that the program would survive, and passed on it.
The point still stands, however. For a program as controversial as this (loan forgiveness in general, that is), it's amazing there's any program at all.
Those wishing to be granted forgiveness have a clear list of requirements they need to meet in order to be considered - yet the article wants me to be outraged at the current administration because so few people that applied bothered to even read the requirements.
Effectively, every dime you put down towards interest on a federal loan is money that could've been spent towards things that benefit the market. If you were to take a pure free market approach, federal student loans are theoretically a Very Bad Thing and it should be in the government's interest to reduce those.