A potential remedy to some FAFSA woes is sitting in Congress. Could it pass?

Dueling plans for the future of American higher education are sitting in Congress right now, gathering dust.

One is a massive overhaul that Democrats say Republicans sprang on them at the start of the year. It would take a chainsaw to the federal student loan system, dramatically reducing the amount of money students can borrow to pay for school and slashing programs that help lower-income graduates make progress on their loans. 

Read more:Rich colleges leave students with crushing debt. Republicans want to fine them.

Another slew of bills, a wish list for Democrats, would go the other way. The bills in their plan, a legislative package they call the “Roadmap to College Student Success,” would double federal grants to less affluent students while expanding access to certain types of student loans. They'd lower interest rates, too. 

In this gridlocked Congress, neither blueprint has much of a prayer.

The Republican vision, a sprawling and controversial 224-page bill, passed out of the House’s education committee two weeks ago on a party-line vote. It could make it through the full House at some point, but it faces a grim future in the Senate, where Democrats hold a slim majority.

Even though the bills themselves may be lost causes, some of the provisions lawmakers have floated in them have gained traction from both sides of the aisle. Nearly everyone in Congress can agree it’s far past time to reauthorize the 1960s-era law governing colleges and universities, which hasn't been updated in more than a decade. 

As the Education Department scrambles to address repeated delays with its long-awaited overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, there’s one bipartisan idea that could potentially ease some of the anxiety for families – standardizing college financial aid offers. 

Read more:Millions of students may have just weeks to compare college financial aid offers

A proposal to do just that has been sitting around in Congress for nearly a year now. This year, there might be a renewed urgency to consider it.

FAFSA applications are down 57% from the same time last year. Colleges are waiting weeks longer than they planned to get critical student data, which means many high school seniors and transfer students may have less time to compare their offers. 

James Kvaal, the undersecretary in the Education Department, acknowledged Wednesday in an interview with USA TODAY that implementing changes to the FAFSA passed by Congress in 2020 has been a "massive undertaking." Flat funding for his agency hasn't made things any easier, he said.

"We're getting very positive feedback from people who have filled out the form," he said. "But it is quite a bit of work to get it in place."

Democrats and Republicans have joined in their criticism of the stumbling FAFSA rollout in recent weeks. Whether their frustrations give them the gumption to put aside their differences and pass any laws, however, is a different question. 

“Our topics end up sitting on the shelf for quite some time,” said Karen McCarthy, the vice president of public policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, in a recent interview. “We pay attention to them when Congress does get some momentum around addressing our topics.” 

One thing Democrats and Republicans agree on?

Miguel Cardona, Biden’s Education secretary, and Rep. Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the House education committee, don’t see eye to eye on most things. The controversial congresswoman recently demanded Cardona’s resignation. 

Yet on at least one thing, they agree: colleges should do more to simplify their price tags. Both Foxx and Cardona are supporters of the College Transparency Initiative, a task force that has successfully urged hundreds of colleges and universities to make their financial aid offers look more alike. 

In the current college environment, the way financial aid offers are written can vary depending on the school a student attends – or hopes to attend. For that reason, comparing offers from different universities can be a challenge for high school seniors. Lawmakers from across the political spectrum have indicated they support standardizing the terminology and formatting requirements colleges use.

One provision in the Republicans’ recently proposed plan, dubbed the College Cost Reduction Act, would require colleges and universities to create a blanket financial aid offer form. The idea builds from a narrower bipartisan bill that has been sitting in the GOP-controlled House education committee for nearly a year. 

The idea hasn’t always boded well with colleges. The newest iteration of the proposal, however, may have moved the needle somewhat.

Emmanual Guillory, the American Council on Education’s senior director of government relations, said in a recent interview that his group hadn’t taken an official stance on the GOP bill, but he felt that compelling colleges to use similar definitions and formatting would help students make more informed decisions. 

Forcing institutions to use a standardized template would create some challenges for colleges, he said, but the need for more transparency around costs shouldn't be ignored.  

Zachary Schermele covers education and breaking news for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.