A authorities watchdog’s investigation into final yr’s rollout of the brand new Free Utility for Federal Scholar Support discovered that Training Division officers didn’t correctly check and put together the shape and launched it regardless of indicators that it was not prepared for extensive launch—an oversight that proved disastrous.
The division’s missteps are detailed in two paperwork from the U.S. Authorities Accountability Workplace launched Tuesday. Their findings had been on the heart of a Home increased training subcommittee listening to Tuesday that featured testimony from two GAO officers, the place lawmakers on either side of the aisle pressed for solutions about who was accountable for the failures and referred to as for accountability.
On the listening to, neither the GAO officers nor the lawmakers expressed confidence within the division’s potential to efficiently roll out the 2025–26 software, which is already delayed by two months to permit for testing that’s set to start subsequent week.
GAO officers warned that the subsequent FAFSA is in danger for much more delays and related technical points to final yr’s due to systemic issues within the division and the Workplace of Federal Scholar Support, the company that oversees the FAFSA.
A number of the GAO’s findings have been public data for months. Inside Larger Ed chronicled lots of them in a wide-ranging investigation revealed in March—together with the truth that FSA didn’t correctly check the brand new kind, perform unbiased opinions of its processing system or repair a slew of technical errors in a well timed method.
However the GAO findings, a part of a long-anticipated report, supply a primary glimpse into the bureaucratic failures behind the scenes, each throughout the overhaul of the shape itself and within the lead-up to its launch. The report additionally incorporates quite a few new revelations about FSA’s dealing with of the rollout and officers’ technique for speaking with college students and faculties.
For one, the GAO discovered that as early as August 2022, FSA knew, or at the least anticipated, that the 2024–25 FAFSA launch must be delayed. That month, the workplace started retooling its schedule for FAFSA processing, transferring deadlines for contractors from October 2023—the shape’s conventional, and on the time anticipated, launch date—to December, but they waited seven months to announce the delay publicly.
The GAO suggests FSA officers might have been getting ready for a risk fairly than an eventuality, but it surely’s the primary proof that points with the rollout timeline emerged greater than a yr earlier than the launch.
Along with planning errors that waylaid the rollout course of, the report discovered that the division’s communication technique—each for serving to faculties perceive the delays and for serving to households navigate the shape—was insufficient.
Of the 5.4 million calls the Training Division’s name heart acquired throughout the first 5 months of the FAFSA rollout, 4 million—or about three-quarters—went unanswered. In line with the report, the division had far fewer staffers working the middle than throughout the prior yr and answered practically 200,000 fewer calls throughout the first 5 months of the rollout.
“The decision heart’s failure to fulfill demand turned a big bottleneck for college students and households who struggled to get assist with urgent points,” the report mentioned. “All 4 name heart contractors failed their buyer satisfaction rating throughout the first 5 months of the rollout.”
The report additionally discovered that the division failed to tell greater than 500,000 college students of adjustments to their federal assist estimates that resulted from corrections to calculation errors throughout the software cycle, main college students to depend on “the wrong estimate … to make choices about which faculty they may afford.”
These recurring errors—what the GAO report calls “unresolved defects”—that persevered nicely after launch are what actually vexed struggling households and turned a problematic launch right into a yearlong debacle that broken public belief within the federal assist system.
The GAO’s findings are in keeping with earlier opinions of the FAFSA launch, which all discovered shortcomings in planning and oversight, which affected the experiences of these on the bottom.
Kim Cook dinner, CEO of the Nationwide School Entry Community, instructed Inside Larger Ed that the report mirrored the challenges that entry organizations and underserved college students confronted final yr.
“Points with the decision heart, points for college students from mixed-status households—we heard all these issues from our members,” she mentioned. “It’s disappointing to learn, however definitely not shocking.”
Failures of Foresight
Division officers, together with Training Secretary Miguel Cardona, have usually mentioned Congress is at the least partly accountable for the FAFSA chaos for refusing to allocate elevated funding to the overhaul challenge. However whereas the GAO report doesn’t dispel the speculation that further assets would have helped keep away from the preliminary launch delay, it attracts a extra direct connection between the division’s errors and the delays and technical glitches that beset the shape all through the appliance cycle.
The report’s findings all level again to at least one key misstep: that the FSA moved ahead with the rollout whereas a lot of the underlying processing system’s important capabilities had been unfinished. On the time of the shape’s launch, 18 of the 25 “key necessities” for launch had not been met, together with “the potential to find out last assist eligibility and distribute these outcomes to colleges”—that means FSA was conscious they’d doubtless should push again processing months sooner than they introduced to high schools. Some monetary assist professionals have mentioned that delay was much more disruptive than the preliminary launch delay, setting again faculties’ timelines for packaging assist provides and forcing many to increase their dedication deadlines.
The truth is, the GAO report discovered that faculties weren’t knowledgeable of the delay till the day earlier than processing was supposed to start.
The report is primarily centered on the FSA’s position within the troubled rollout. The company has been on the coronary heart of the fallout: Its chief working officer, Richard Cordray, resigned in April after backlash, and the Training Division is presently conducting an inside assessment of the company.
However the GAO discovered that there’s blame to share throughout different Training Division workplaces and leaders. The division’s chief data officer, as an example, “didn’t present efficient oversight” of the FAFSA rollout: The CIO workplace initially rated the challenge a 3, which represented medium threat, however the workplace didn’t assessment that score till June 2024—greater than 5 months after the appliance launched. The CIO’s workplace instructed GAO they didn’t conduct threat assessments for the overhaul as a result of from 2021 to 2024 they had been “revising the division’s associated processes” for assessing threat.
The report steered that top turnover within the CIO workplace is partly accountable for this oversight. Because the FAFSA overhaul started in 2021, there have been six totally different Training Division CIOs, in accordance with the report. A “lack of constant management” is one in every of many extra systemic, department-level flaws that the GAO warns may undermine this cycle’s FAFSA launch, which has already been pushed again two months.
“Till the division addresses these weaknesses, it is going to be hampered in its potential to make wanted enhancements to [the FAFSA processing system],” the report concludes. “This might put the 2025–2026 FAFSA cycle at elevated threat for experiencing additional delays and technical errors.”
Can’t Escape the Previous
The existence of the GAO report itself has made headlines this previous yr: Congressional Republicans requested for the investigation in January after which accused the division of obstructing the assessment.
At Tuesday’s listening to, lawmakers reacted with constructing indignation to the GAO’s findings.
“It’s wonderful that [the FAFSA] has been round for 30 years, and it solely took two and a half to blow it up completely,” Consultant Burgess Owens, a Utah Republican and the subcommittee chair, mentioned in response to the GAO’s findings. “Usually if anyone is that this incompetent, they’re fired.”
Democrats have additionally criticized the Biden administration’s dealing with of the challenge, which was mandated by Congress.
“Regrettably, the implementation of the legislation has been derailed by a sequence of avoidable errors made by the Division of Training,” Consultant Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat, mentioned in her opening remarks.
Wilson added that she’s been inspired by the division’s progress for the subsequent software cycle and emphasised the significance of getting this yr’s rollout proper.
That appears to be the place the division’s focus is, too. The division launched its personal inside report Monday, subtitled “A path ahead for the 2025–26 cycle,” wherein they mentioned they had been “dedicated to studying from challenges with [last cycle’s] launch” and outlined plans for testing the shape to make sure it’s “totally useful” upon launching.
After the listening to, the division launched an announcement highlighting what they’d discovered from the challenges of the previous yr as they strategy the beginning of this yr’s phased-in FAFSA rollout subsequent month.
“We have now sought recommendation from college students and households, faculties, and companions and offered greater than 1,000 paperwork to the [GAO],” the assertion reads. “We have now strengthened our management staff, expanded name heart capability, and begun rigorously testing subsequent yr’s FAFSA as we work towards totally launching the shape.”
However the GAO report’s findings are positive to reignite anger over the division’s dealing with of the brand new kind simply as officers are attempting to shift the nationwide dialog towards the long run.
A GAO spokesperson instructed Inside Larger Ed that the workplace remains to be investigating the rollout and reviewing the FAFSA processing system; they count on to conclude their work by early subsequent yr.
