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 did not correctly take a look at and put together the shape and launched it regardless of indicators that it was not prepared for vast 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 have been on the heart of a Home larger training subcommittee listening to Tuesday that featured testimony from two GAO officers, the place lawmakers on each side of the aisle pressed for solutions about who was accountable for the failures and known as for accountability.
On the listening to, neither the GAO officers nor the lawmakers expressed confidence within the division’s means to efficiently roll out the 2025–26 utility, which is already delayed by two months to permit for testing that’s set to start subsequent week.
GAO officers warned that the following FAFSA is in danger for much more delays and comparable 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 few of the GAO’s findings have been public information for months. Inside Greater Ed chronicled a lot of them in a wide-ranging investigation revealed in March—together with the truth that FSA didn’t correctly take a look at the brand new kind, perform impartial evaluations 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 in the course of the overhaul of the shape itself and within the lead-up to its launch. The report additionally comprises numerous new revelations about FSA’s dealing with of the rollout and officers’ technique for speaking with college students and schools.
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 could have been making ready for a chance slightly 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 schools 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 obtained in the course of 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 in the course of the prior yr and answered almost 200,000 fewer calls in the course of the first 5 months of the rollout.
“The decision heart’s failure to satisfy demand grew to become a major bottleneck for college students and households who struggled to get assist with urgent points,” the report stated. “All 4 name heart contractors failed their buyer satisfaction rating in the course of the first 5 months of the rollout.”
The report additionally discovered that the division failed to tell greater than 500,000 college students of modifications to their federal support estimates that resulted from corrections to calculation errors in the course of the utility cycle, main college students to depend on “the wrong estimate … to make choices about which faculty they might afford.”
These recurring errors—what the GAO report calls “unresolved defects”—that persevered nicely after launch are what really vexed struggling households and turned a problematic launch right into a yearlong debacle that broken public belief within the federal support system.
The GAO’s findings are according to earlier evaluations of the FAFSA launch, which all discovered shortcomings in planning and oversight, which affected the experiences of these on the bottom.
Kim Prepare dinner, CEO of the Nationwide Faculty Entry Community, instructed Inside Greater 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 stated. “It’s disappointing to learn, however actually not stunning.”
Failures of Foresight
Division officers, together with Training Secretary Miguel Cardona, have usually stated Congress is at the least partly accountable for the FAFSA chaos for refusing to allocate elevated funding to the overhaul mission. 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 1 key misstep: that the FSA moved ahead with the rollout whereas a lot of the underlying processing system’s important capabilities have 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 aptitude to find out ultimate support eligibility and distribute these outcomes to varsities”—that means FSA was conscious they’d doubtless must push again processing months sooner than they introduced to schools. Some monetary support professionals have stated that delay was even extra disruptive than the preliminary launch delay, setting again schools’ timelines for packaging support affords and forcing many to increase their dedication deadlines.
In reality, 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 targeted 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 at the moment conducting an inner evaluate 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, for example, “didn’t present efficient oversight” of the FAFSA rollout: The CIO workplace initially rated the mission a 3, which represented medium danger, however the workplace didn’t evaluate that ranking till June 2024—greater than 5 months after the appliance launched. The CIO’s workplace instructed GAO they didn’t conduct danger assessments for the overhaul as a result of from 2021 to 2024 they have been “revising the division’s associated processes” for assessing danger.
The report advised that prime turnover within the CIO workplace is partly accountable for this oversight. Because the FAFSA overhaul started in 2021, there have been six completely different Training Division CIOs, based on the report. A “lack of constant management” is considered one 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 means to make wanted enhancements to [the FAFSA processing system],” the report concludes. “This might put the 2025–2026 FAFSA cycle at elevated danger 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 evaluate.
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, stated in response to the GAO’s findings. “Usually if someone is that this incompetent, they’re fired.”
Democrats have additionally criticized the Biden administration’s dealing with of the mission, which was mandated by Congress.
“Regrettably, the implementation of the regulation has been derailed by a collection of avoidable errors made by the Division of Training,” Consultant Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat, stated in her opening remarks.
Wilson added that she’s been inspired by the division’s progress for the following utility 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 inner report Monday, subtitled “A path ahead for the 2025–26 cycle,” through which they stated they have 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 realized from the challenges of the previous yr as they strategy the beginning of this yr’s phased-in FAFSA rollout subsequent month.
“We now have sought recommendation from college students and households, schools, and companions and offered greater than 1,000 paperwork to the [GAO],” the assertion reads. “We now have strengthened our management workforce, expanded name heart capability, and begun fastidiously testing subsequent yr’s FAFSA as we work towards totally launching the shape.”
However the GAO report’s findings are certain to reignite anger over the division’s dealing with of the brand new kind simply as officers try to shift the nationwide dialog towards the long run.
A GAO spokesperson instructed Inside Greater Ed that the workplace continues to be investigating the rollout and reviewing the FAFSA processing system; they anticipate to conclude their work by early subsequent yr.
