Federal lawmakers on Tuesday heard another round of testimony about the disastrous rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. And once again, numerous damning details emerged.
This time, officials from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, or GAO, shared findings from two new reports about the continuing federal-aid crisis with members of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development. The GAO, known as the “congressional watchdog,” is an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress. It has been investigating the Education Department’s rollout of the revamped FAFSA at the behest of a group of Republicans in Congress. The GAO’s findings and testimony provided the most detailed picture yet of the federal-aid system’s failures — and how those failures have been affecting students.
The revamped FAFSA had numerous problems from the start, the GAO found, and new ones kept popping up after the application finally went live last December. As described in one of the GAO reports, the Federal Student Aid office, or FSA, decided not to tackle 18 of 25 “key requirements” before rolling out the new FAFSA-processing system. Among them: the capability to determine an applicant’s final federal-aid eligibility and then send the results to colleges’ financial-aid offices.
The GAO found that the department rushed through its preliminary testing — and that senior FSA officials approved testing reviews even “though significant work had not yet been completed.” In short, the findings lead to the conclusion that the department was well aware of the FAFSA system’s major problems, but pushed ahead anyway.
And the department apparently knew that major FAFSA-processing delays were inevitable long before it informed colleges, on January 30, that they wouldn’t receive processed FAFSAs until mid-March, much later than promised. That unpleasant surprise disrupted colleges’ financial-aid timelines and forced many applicants to wait — and wait — for their aid offers. In short, the FAFSA crisis wasn’t just a technical failure: It was a communication failure, too.
Several more issues came to light last winter as applicants hit wall after wall while trying to complete the FAFSA. The GAO found that the department had identified 55 defects, including several that were unresolved and categorized as “critical,” as of early March. One such error excluded some families’ assets from the aid-eligibility calculation, resulting in overestimates of how much aid they should get.
Marisol Cruz Cain, the GAO’s director of information, technology, and cybersecurity, told the subcommittee on Tuesday that FSA didn’t always follow its own guidance for managing contractual requirements or testing the system. “In addition, FSA did not conduct an independent review of the project’s processes, products, and risks throughout its life cycle,” she said. “This limited the agency’s ability to identify and address cost, schedule, and performance risks.”
Cruz Cain also said that chief information officers, or CIOs, at the department and FSA weren’t involved in crucial governance and oversight activities all along. “Key to these shortcomings,” she said, is the department’s “lack of consistent and effective leadership.”
The GAO concluded that turnover played a role in the FAFSA meltdown. Since 2021, it found, the department has had six CIOs. That “lack of consistent leadership contributed to the difficulties,” the GAO wrote. “Until the department addresses these weaknesses, it will be hampered in its ability to make needed improvements ... This could put the 2025–2026 FAFSA cycle at increased risk for experiencing further delays and technical errors.”
Those are just some of the problems, the GAO found, that left families with a slew of obstacles when trying to complete the FAFSA this year. Initially, applicants born in the year 2000 couldn’t complete the form, for instance — a problem that wasn’t fixed until March; such students apparently weren’t informed of the situation, or told when it was resolved.
Some graduate students completing the FAFSA were told that they were eligible for federal Pell Grants — even though only undergraduates can receive them.
Students and parents have seen their signatures disappear after returning to a saved application.
Some parents couldn’t even get past the form’s first section.
The GAO found that as of early September, just 35 of the 55 FAFSA defects had been resolved.
Students with a spouse or parent who lacks a Social Security number have found the new FAFSA especially difficult, as the second GAO report describes in detail. Many mixed-status families couldn’t complete the identity-verification process due to problems with the application system. The GAO estimates that 15-40 percent of FAFSA users without a Social Security number succeeded in getting through that process.
But all the rest had to wade through the manual verification process, a burdensome task that required them to email documents confirming their identity. For many of those families, significant delays ensued.
The GAO identified two main problems that left many mixed-status families in federal-aid limbo for weeks or months. First, it found that the department had greatly underestimated how many people would need to complete manual verification. The initial estimate: 3,500. But about 219,000 spouses and parents lacking a Social Security number ended up going through that process. And by mid-June, the GAO found, only 39 percent of them had been able to do so.
“So, the estimate was off by 98 percent,” Rep. Kathy E. Manning, a Democrat from North Carolina, said during Tuesday’s hearing. “How did this happen?”
“The department simply neglected to include estimates for students in mixed-status families,” said Melissa Emrey-Arras, the GAO’s director of education, workforce, and income security. “And because of that, they didn’t provide enough staffing to do the manual verification, which was incredibly burdensome and difficult for mixed-status families.”
In response to a follow-up question, Emrey-Arras said that the department simply didn’t account for how the new FAFSA’s identity-verification requirements would affect such families: “They vastly underestimated how many people would be needed to process verifications, and because of that, people suffered.”
Emrey-Arras told the subcommittee that the department had also greatly underestimated how many students and parents would call in seeking help with the application. The GAO found that nearly three-quarters of calls to the department’s FAFSA call center — 4 million out of 5.4 million calls — went unanswered during the first five months of 2024. For the first month, the department employed about 900 call-center staff, even though it had employed more than 1,600 during the first month of the previous FAFSA cycle. But it received more than twice as many calls as it had projected.
“The call center’s failure to meet demand,” the GAO concluded, “became a significant bottleneck for students and families who struggled to get help with pressing issues that delayed or entirely prevented them from successfully accessing and completing the FAFSA.”
The Education Department is trying to begin a new chapter. On Monday, it released a report describing what it had learned from this year’s FAFSA challenges — and how it plans to move forward this fall.
The 10-page document explains the department’s recent efforts to overhaul the processes and systems that caused so many headaches during the 2024-25 financial-aid cycle. Starting on October 1, the department has pledged to test the FAFSA’s functionality, identify technical problems, and fix them as quickly as possible before December, when the form is scheduled to become fully available.
The department said it’s “modernizing FSA,” having hired new leaders and experts to help develop the FAFSA. The report described how the department has been trying to reduce the number of FAFSAs that require corrections, particularly for the most common reasons, which are: missing student and parent signatures, and applicants choosing that they would like to be considered only for direct unsubsidized loans instead of a wider array of aid they might be eligible for. (The default answer to the latter question has been changed to “No,” and a pop-up message now warns students that changing their answer to “Yes” could result in FAFSA errors.)
And the department said it would continue to send more timely emails to students and contributors about the status of their form, plus specific information about additional steps they might need to take.
Since January, the department’s vendors have added more than 700 new customer-service agents — an 80-percent increase — to keep up with projected call volumes down the line.
In April, the department announced one temporary solution: FAFSA contributors without a Social Security number would no longer be required to complete the manual verification before a student could receive federal aid. That change will be extended into the 2025-26 aid cycle and until a permanent fix is in place.
“To improve the FAFSA experience,” the report says, “we have been working tirelessly — and will continue to do so — to ensure that all students and their families can easily access and complete the form and that they have timely and clear information.”
The department also described the results of its recent FAFSA-completion outreach campaign meant to close a sizable submission gap. As of March, about 40-percent fewer students (including first-time filers and returning college students) had submitted a FAFSA compared with the same point in 2023. As of late September, that gap had decreased to about 2 percent.
The GAO acknowledged that impact on Tuesday. “We did find that [the department] partnered with many individuals, states, school districts, nonprofits, did extensive email and text message campaigns, as well as social media outreach to try to reach those students, and they did, in fact, close the gap significantly,” Emrey-Arras said. “And we think that the department needs to continue community partnerships, needs to continue to engage with the students that have not submitted FAFSAs, so that they are not left behind and lost.”
What does all this add up to? A bitter twist, for one thing: The first year of the new FAFSA — designed to be simpler to complete — stymied many of the students who need the most help getting to college.
Though the Education Department has reduced the overall FAFSA-submission gap, Emrey-Arras described how FAFSA delays and technical issues had contributed to a 9-percent decline in the number of first-time college applicants — most of whom are high-school seniors — this year, compared with the previous cycle. Those declines, the GAO found, were especially pronounced among low-income students and families (for dependent students, the drop in submissions was greatest for those with annual incomes between $30,000-$48,000 a year).
Tuesday’s hearing was relatively low-key, but legislators’ frustrations were palpable. Rep. Burgess Owens, a Republican from Utah and chair of the subcommittee, called the GAO’s findings “horrific and inexplicable.” The Biden administration, as he put it, “has left millions of students and families scrambling in the dark.” And he said the administration “has a lot of explaining to do to regain the trust of American families before the next FAFSA, hopefully, is released with a full and accurate functionality in December.”
Some partisan remarks aside, legislators from both political parties seemed united by concern about whether that would really happen. A few shared their doubts. But Rep. Frederica S. Wilson, a Democrat from Florida and the ranking member of the subcommittee, expressed optimism: “My focus is on the future and the immense potential we have to get this right. We must look forward and figure this out. Our children and families are depending on us. I want to emphasize faith in the Department of Education’s ability to turn this situation around.”
Rep. Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia, called the FAFSA situation “a total mess.”
He asked Cruz Cain if she expected to find other problems with the FAFSA: “If we can get those solved, we’ll be straight?”
“Well, they have to solve those problems first,” Cruz Cain said, “but with each different cycle, the department intends to include new requirements — so the requirements they did not include in the initial release, and each one of those has to be thoroughly tested. So we do expect them to find a number of defects. You do find defects anytime you test. They really need to focus on solving those defects before the functionality is deployed for the students.”
“They have a contract with IT experts,” Scott said. “Do you have confidence that the people they’ve contracted with can actually perform what they’re supposed to do?”
“I think if FSA oversees the contract and follows the best practices for systems development and testing, they could deliver the functionality,” Cruz Cain said, “but from what we’ve seen — the oversight, the testing issues — if they keep managing it the way they are, I don’t have confidence that they’ll be able to deliver the functionality.”
“You mentioned the call centers,” Scott said. “Has that problem been solved?
“We’ll see what happens,” Cruz Cain replied, “when the new FAFSA rolls out.”
The FAFSA crisis began many months ago, but the suspsense is far from over.
