A federal investigation into last year’s release of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid found that Education Department officials failed to properly review and correct the form and submitted it despite signs that it was not ready for widespread release—an oversight that proved disastrous.
The department’s mistakes are detailed in two documents from the US State Department, released this morning. GAO officials will testify about the findings at a House higher education subcommittee hearing today.
The department has already delayed the submission of the application form for the 2025-26 application cycle until December in order to allow time for the examination, which is scheduled to begin next week. GAO officials warned that the next FAFSA is at risk of similar delays and technical problems due to system problems at the department and the Office of Federal Student Aid, the agency that oversees the FAFSA.
Some of the GAO’s findings have been public knowledge for months. Within Higher Ed listed many of them in a wide-ranging investigation published in March—including the fact that the FSA did not properly test the new form, conduct independent reviews of its processing system or correct a number of technical errors in a timely manner.
But the findings released this morning, part of a long-awaited report, provide the first insight into the failures of officials behind the scenes, both during the reform of the form itself and before its release. The report also contains a number of new revelations about the FSA’s handling of the issue and the officers’ strategies for communicating with students and colleges.
First, the GAO found that by August 2022, the FSA knew, or at least expected, that the issuance of the 2024-25 FAFSA would have to be delayed. That month, the office began overhauling its FAFSA processing schedule, moving contractor deadlines from October 2023—the form’s traditional, and expected, release date—to December, yet they waited seven months to publicly announce the delay.
The GAO suggests that FSA officials may have been preparing for an eventuality rather than an eventuality, but it is the first evidence that problems with the rollout timeline emerged more than a year before the launch.
In addition to the logistical errors that plagued the discharge process, the report found that the department’s communication strategy—both to help colleges understand the delay and to help families navigate the form—was inadequate.
Of the 5.4 million calls the Department of Education’s call center received in the first five months of the FAFSA’s release, four million—or about three-quarters—went unanswered. According to the report, the department was significantly less staffed than the previous year and answered nearly 200,000 calls in the first five months of its operation.
“The failure of this call center to meet the needs has been a big problem for students and families who have been struggling to get help with difficult problems,” said the report. “All four call center contractors failed to achieve customer satisfaction in the first 5 months of rollout.”
The report also found that the department failed to notify more than 500,000 students of changes in their state aid estimates due to corrections to math errors during the application cycle, resulting in students relying on “incorrect estimates … to make decisions about which college they can afford.”
These emerging errors—what the GAO report calls “unresolved errors”—that persisted well after the rollout are what plagued struggling families and turned the problematic rollout into a year-long mess that undermined public trust in the federal assistance system.
The GAO’s findings are consistent with previous reviews of FAFSA submissions, all of which found errors in planning and oversight.
Failure of foresight
Department officials, including Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, have been saying that Congress is at least partially responsible for the FAFSA mess by refusing to allocate more money to the reform program. But while the GAO report does not dismiss the idea that additional resources would have helped to avoid the initial delay in submission, it draws a direct connection between the department’s errors and the delays and technical difficulties that plague the form during the application cycle.
The report’s findings all point back to one important step: that the FSA went ahead with the rollout while most of the processing system’s critical capabilities had not yet been completed. At the time of the form’s release, 18 of the 25 “key requirements” for the rollout had not been met, including “the ability to determine eligibility for final aid and disseminate those results to schools”—meaning the FSA knew it would have to push back processing months before announcing to colleges. Some financial aid experts say the delay is more disruptive than the initial delay in submissions, pushing back colleges’ time to package aid donations and forcing many to extend their commitment period.
In fact, the GAO report found that colleges were not notified of the delay until the day before processing began.
The report focuses on the FSA’s role in problematic emissions. The agency has been at the heart of the controversy: Its chief operating officer, Richard Cordray, resigned in April after backlash, and the Department of Education is currently conducting an internal investigation into the agency.
But the GAO found that there is shared responsibility across Education Department offices and leaders. The department’s chief information officer, for example, “did not provide effective oversight” of the FAFSA rollout: The CIO’s office initially rated the project a 3, which represented medium risk, but the office did not revise that rating until June 2024—more. more than five months after the submission of the application. The CIO’s office told the GAO that they did not conduct a risk assessment for the overhaul because from 2021 to 2024 they were “reviewing department-related processes” for risk assessment.
The report suggested that the high salary in the office of the CIO is the reason for this control. Since the FAFSA overhaul began in 2021, there have been six different Department of Education CIOs, according to the report. A “lack of consistent leadership” is one of many systemic, department-level flaws that the GAO warns could undermine the rollout of this round of FAFSA, which has already been pushed back two months.
“Until the Department deals with these problems, it will be hindered from being able to make the necessary improvements [the FAFSA processing system],” the report concluded. “This would put the 2025-2026 FAFSA cycle at an increased risk of experiencing additional delays and technical errors.”
You Can’t Escape the Past
The existence of the GAO report itself has made headlines this past year: Congressional Republicans called for an investigation in January and accused the department of blocking the review.
Democrats have also criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the project, which was authorized by Congress.
“Sadly, the implementation of the law has been hampered by a series of avoidable mistakes made by the Department of Education,” Representative Frederica Wilson, Florida Democrat, said in prepared opening remarks before Tuesday’s hearing.
Wilson added that he was encouraged by the department’s progress in the next application cycle and stressed the importance of fixing this year’s issue.
It looks like that’s where the department is focused. The ministry released its own internal report on Monday, titled “A path forward for the 2025–26 cycle,” in which it said it was “willing to learn from the challenges [last cycle’s] is submitted” and plans are in place to test this form to ensure that it is “fully functional” when submitted.
But the findings of the GAO report are sure to fuel anger over the department’s handling of the new form as officials try to shift the national conversation toward the future. A GAO spokesman said Within Higher Ed that the office is still investigating the issuance and revision of the FAFSA processing plan; they expect to complete their work early next year.
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