- GAO issues reports on 2024-25 FAFSA and mismanagement at the Department of Education
- Congress avoids a government shutdown, buys time on FY25 funding bills
GAO issues reports on 2024-25 FAFSA and mismanagement at the Department of Education
This week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the watchdog for federal agencies, released two new reports on the troubled rollout of the 2024-25 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and coordination and leadership shortcomings at the Department of Education (ED). The report was requested by Congressional Republicans in January and was unveiled at a House Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee hearing on Tuesday. Led by subcommittee chair Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), the hearing featured testimony from Melissa Emrey-Arras, GAO’s director of education, workforce, and income security issues, and Marisol Cruz Cain, GAO’s director of information technology and cybersecurity, who covered the contents of the reports.
The first report details the agency’s many missteps that led to a variety of problems: significant delays in FAFSA processing, confusion for students and families, additional workload for financial aid offices, and, most significantly, disproportionately low engagement for low-income students throughout the 2024-25 financial aid cycle. Among the report’s most striking findings is that the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) launched the 2024-25 FAFSA in late December of 2023 even as 18 of 25 “key requirements” – steps that the agency had deemed essential for a seamless launch in the rollout of the new FAFSA Processing System (FPS) – had not been satisfied. These requirements included “the capability to determine final aid eligibility and distribute those results to schools.”
The decision to push forward to meet the Dec. 31, 2023 statutory deadline underlies many of the report’s other findings. Agency officials had been privately forecasting a delay in form launch and FAFSA processing as early as August 2022. Nevertheless, they waited seven months to share this critical information with colleges and other stakeholders. After falling behind in the rollout of the launch, the agency failed to do proper testing to uncover glitches and issues with processing before making the form available. In part because of the large number of issues that were not uncovered and addressed, call center volume was much higher than anticipated, and ED failed to properly adjust staffing. Of the 5.4 million calls from students, families, counselors, and colleges, four million went unanswered.
The second report looks more closely at processes and procedures at ED and FSA and how mismanagement contributed to the FAFSA debacle. The report’s key finding is that the Department’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) failed to provide proper oversight of the launch of the FPS. The office of the CIO did not do any risk assessments for the system between 2021 to 2024, despite this being agency policy and critical to any program involving the agency’s information technology infrastructure. The GAO attributes this decision to a high rate of turnover of CIOs at the Department (Note: Also this week, ED announced the appointment of Thomas Flagg to serve as the agency’s new CIO, effective October 6). The investigators warn that without more consistent leadership and coordination within ED, many of the same issues could arise with the 2025-26 FAFSA.
On Monday, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona sent a letter to college and university presidents and a white paper detailing the Department’s preemptively published response to the GAO reports. The white paper details the closing gap in FAFSA filers in the 2024-25 award year compared to the previous year, the deployment of ED’s “FAFSA Student Support Strategy,” and their efforts to improve the form for the upcoming award year through listening sessions and a Request for Information (RFI) on ways to improve the form (Note: AACC responded to the RFI based on feedback from financial aid officers at community colleges across the country). The white paper more directly responds to the GAO’s findings by promising more transparency and predictability on timelines, robust testing of the FAFSA form prior to launch, and more robust support functions and resources for students, families, and colleges, including adding more than 700 new agents to call centers.
AACC is carefully monitoring the rollout of the 2025-26 FAFSA. Please contact AACC’s Office of Government Relations (OGR) to discuss these issues further.
Congress avoids a government shutdown, buys time on FY25 funding bills
On Wednesday, Congress approved a short-term funding bill to keep government agencies funded through December 20. The bipartisan Continuing Resolution (CR) will maintain Fiscal Year 2024 (FY 24) funding levels for the next three months, while giving Congress more time to finalize FY 25 appropriations bills in the lame-duck succession that will occur after the November elections. These negotiations are expected to be highly contentious and influenced by the election outcomes. When final FY 2025 funding levels are set, the Senate’s $100 increase in the Pell Grant maximum will be on the table. Of note is the fact the CR did not include the President’s request for additional funding for the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA). Inadequate funding has been cited as one reason for the Administration’s difficulties in successfully implementing the new FAFSA.