The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the watchdog for federal agencies, last week 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 U.S. Education Department.
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 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 December 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 launch rollout, 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 adjust staffing properly. Of the 5.4 million calls from students, families, counselors and colleges, four million went unanswered.
Congressional Republicans in January requested the report, which was unveiled at a House Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee hearing last 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.
No risk assessments
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) didn’t provide proper oversight of the FPS launch. Despite agency policy, the CIO did not perform any risk assessments for the system between 2021 to 2024, which is critical to any program involving the agency’s information technology infrastructure.
GAO attributes this decision to the department’s high turnover rate of CIOs. (ED this week announced the appointment of Thomas Flagg 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.
ED’s preemptive response
Last week prior to the hearing, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona sent a letter to college and university presidents and a white paper detailing the ED’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 its 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. (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.
Testing the 2025-26 form
The department is currently undergoing the first of four rounds of “beta” testing for the 2025-26 FAFSA, with a limited set of volunteer students and organizations testing the form, beginning on October 1. Each beta test will look at student and contributor experiences filling out and submitting the form, transmission of Institutional Student Information Records (ISIRs) to states and institutions, and student- and institution-initiated corrections, with the goal of identifying and addressing issues before opening the form to the general public on December 1.
The Department on Monday announced the 78 colleges and universities, high schools, state agencies and college access groups that applied and were selected to be part of betas tests. Community college participants will include Ventura College, Eastern Florida State College, Guam Community College, SUNY Orange Community College, Dallas College and South Texas College. Beta 2 will begin in mid-October, followed by Beta 3 in early November, and finally, Beta 4 in mid-November.
Contact the American Association of Community Colleges’ government relations staff with any questions or comments.
