Over at The American Prospect, Ryan Cooper describes how, once college loan payments were restarted, the system went to shit–and this was not only predictable, but predicted (boldface mine):

Back in June of last year, my colleague David Dayen predicted that ending the pandemic-era student loan repayment pause would be a logistical disaster. In theory, the Biden administration has cobbled together a student loan scheme that should not be too burdensome for anyone. It indeed would radically change how higher education is financed, if it can be sustained.

The problem is the dependence on mostly private companies to actually service the loans correctly. These companies have a mile-long track record of errors—wrong names, wrong addresses, wrong payments, you name it. Worse, the pandemic and the student loan repayment pause created enormous chaos in the servicer system.

A new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) shows that Dayen was correct. Agency examiners have found that borrowers “are facing long hold times when trying to reach their servicer by phone, significant delays in servicers’ processing of their applications for income-driven repayment, and inaccurate billing statements.”

Specifically, average time spent on hold when calling servicers for help increased from 12 minutes in August to 73 minutes in October. As a result, the percentage of callers hanging up before speaking to a representative increased from 17 percent to 47 percent over the same period. One caller reportedly spent almost nine and a half hours on hold trying to reach someone…

Now, the CFPB doesn’t yet say what fraction of loans might be subject to these problems. But we do know that about 60 percent of borrowers (or about 15 million of them) have resumed payments, and if the skyrocketing number of problems is any judge, it’s probably a sizable chunk. The Education Department has now found over 3 million billing mistakes since the resumption of payments last October, with another 758,000 announced last Friday. This fits with Wall Street Journal reporting from December with much anecdotal testimony about billing and payment issues.

This points to a long-standing and far too frequent problem with Democratic governance: the inability to make things work easily and efficiently for the people who use them. Make things easy to use and easy to access. Don’t make users have to fight like hell just to ensure things work the way they should. Admittedly, Republicans actively don’t want these things to be successful, but professional Democrats need to get far more serious about how to execute policy. Because, while vibes are important, people do have to like this crap.