Hmm, seems like with most government plans it has one good idea coupled with two bad ones. This makes a lot of sense for properly authenticating the user when accessing government services. It would be really convenient to have a unified ID for FAFSA, Tax filing, registrations and permit applications, etc. If you're like me and forgot your FAFSA PIN pretty much every semester when you tried to use it, it does seem useful. Two major bad ideas though: generalizing it for non-government logins, and storing the data with third parties. Dumb dumb dumb, and dangerous.
Oh the best is when you have a FAFSA account and your parent has a FAFSA account and you have a NYS TAP account and you have a college account and oh my god all the pin numbers. Thank fucking god I can pull all my tax info directly into the FAFSA filing by entering my pin, going to the IRS site real quick and clicking "yes".