A government watchdog’s investigation into the launch of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid last year found that Education Department officials failed to properly test and prepare the form and released it despite signs that it was not ready for widespread release – a failure that proved disastrous.

The department’s missteps are detailed in two U.S. Government Accountability Office documents released Tuesday. Their findings were the focus of a House Higher Education Subcommittee hearing on Tuesday that featured testimony from two GAO officials, with lawmakers on both sides pressing for answers about who was responsible for the mistakes and demanding accountability.

At the hearing, neither GAO officials nor lawmakers expressed confidence in the department’s ability to successfully roll out the 2025-2026 application, which has already been delayed by two months to accommodate testing scheduled to begin next week.

GAO officials warned that the next FAFSA is at risk of even further delays and similar technical problems to last year due to systemic problems within 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. Inside Higher Ed Many of these were documented in a comprehensive investigation published in March – including that the FSA failed to properly test the new form, conduct independent reviews of its processing system or fail to correct a number of technical errors in a timely manner.

But the GAO findings, part of a long-awaited report, offer a first glimpse into the bureaucratic failings behind the scenes, both during the revision of the form itself and in the run-up to its release. The report also contains a number of new revelations about the FSA’s handling of the rollout and officials’ strategy for communicating with students and colleges.

For one thing, GAO found that FSA knew, or at least expected, as early as August 2022 that the 2024-25 FAFSA release would need to be delayed. This month, the office began retooling its FAFSA processing schedule, moving contractor deadlines from October 2023 — the form’s traditional and expected release date — to December, but they waited seven months to publicly announce the delay .

The GAO notes that FSA officials may have been preparing for a possibility rather than an eventuality, but it is the first evidence that problems with the rollout timeline arose more than a year before launch.

In addition to planning errors that hampered the rollout process, the report found the department’s communications strategy was inadequate – both to help colleges understand the delays and to help families navigate the form.

Of the 5.4 million calls the Department of Education’s call center received in the first five months of the FAFSA rollout, four million — or about three-quarters — went unanswered. According to the report, the department had significantly fewer people running the center compared to the previous year and answered nearly 200,000 fewer calls in the first five months of the rollout.

“The call center’s failure to meet demand became a significant bottleneck for students and families who were struggling to get help with urgent issues,” the report said. “All four call center contractors missed their customer satisfaction ratings in the first five months of implementation.”

The report also found that the department failed to inform more than 500,000 students of changes to their federal aid estimates that resulted from corrections of calculation errors during the application period, resulting in students relying on “the inaccurate estimate…” to Making decisions about what college she could afford to attend.”

These recurring errors — which the GAO report calls “unresolved deficiencies” — which persisted long after the rollout was implemented, were what really angered struggling families and turned a problematic rollout into a years-long debacle that undermined public trust into the state aid system.

GAO’s findings are consistent with previous reviews of the FAFSA launch, which found any deficiencies in planning and oversight that impacted people’s experiences on the ground.

Kim Cook, CEO of the National College Access Network, said Inside Higher Ed that the report reflected the challenges faced by access organizations and underserved students over the past year.

“Problems with the call center, problems for students from mixed-status families – we’ve heard all of that from our members,” she said. “It’s disappointing to read, but certainly not surprising.”

Error of foresight

Department officials, including Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, have often said that Congress was at least partially to blame for the FAFSA mess because it refused to provide more funding for the overhaul project. But while the GAO report doesn’t refute the theory that additional resources would have helped avoid the initial implementation delay, it does draw a more direct connection between the department’s mistakes and the delays and technical glitches that plagued the form during the plague the entire application cycle.

The report’s findings all point to one key misstep: that the FSA pushed ahead with the rollout while most of the essential functionality of the underlying processing system was not yet complete. At the time the form was published, 18 of the 25 “key requirements” for implementation had not yet been met, including “the ability to determine final aid eligibility and distribute those results to schools” – meaning the FSA was aware that they They would probably have to push back processing months earlier than they had announced to colleges. Some financial aid experts said the delay was even more disruptive than the initial rollout delay, delaying colleges’ timelines for putting together aid offers and forcing many to extend their commitment deadlines.

In fact, the GAO report found that colleges were not informed of the delay until the day before processing began.

The report focuses primarily on the FSA’s role in the problematic rollout. The agency has been at the center of the fallout: Its chief operating officer, Richard Cordray, resigned in April after backlash, and the Education Department is currently conducting an internal review of the agency.

However, the GAO found that blame can also be spread among other 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, representing medium risk, but the office did not review that rating until June 2024 – up from a five Months after launching the application. The CIO’s office told the GAO that they had not conducted risk assessments for the overhaul because they would be revising “the department’s relevant processes” for risk assessment from 2021 to 2024.

The report suggests that high turnover in the CIO office is partly responsible for this failure. According to the report, there have been six different Department of Education CIOs since the FAFSA revision began in 2021. A “lack of consistent leadership” is one of many other systemic deficiencies at the department level that GAO warns about that could jeopardize this cycle’s FAFSA launch, which has already been delayed by two months.

“Unless the department addresses these weaknesses, it will be limited in its ability to make necessary improvements (to the FAFSA processing system),” the report concludes. “This could increase the risk of further delays and technical errors for the 2025-2026 FAFSA cycle.”

I can’t escape the past

The existence of the GAO report itself made headlines last year: Republicans in Congress called for an investigation in January and then accused the department of obstructing the review.

At Tuesday’s hearing, lawmakers reacted to the GAO’s findings with growing outrage.

“It’s amazing that (the FAFSA) has been around for 30 years and it only took two and a half for it to be completely blown up,” Rep. Burgess Owens, a Republican from Utah and chairman of the subcommittee, responded the GAO’s findings. “When someone is that incompetent, they usually get fired.”

Democrats also criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the project as ordered by Congress.

“Regrettably, implementation of the law was derailed by a series of avoidable mistakes by the Department of Education,” Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat, said in her opening statement.

Wilson added that she was encouraged by the department’s progress for the next application cycle and stressed the importance of getting the rollout right this year.

This also seems to be the focus of the department. The department released its own internal report on Monday, subtitled “A Path Forward for the 2025-26 Cycle,” in which it said it was “committed to learning from the challenges of rolling out (the last cycle)” and outlined plans to test the form to ensure it is “fully functional” upon launch.

Following the hearing, the department released a statement highlighting what it has learned from the past year’s challenges as it approaches the start of this year’s phased-in FAFSA next month.

“We consulted students and families, colleges and partners and provided more than 1,000 documents to the (GAO),” the statement said. “We have strengthened our leadership team, expanded call center capacity, and have begun carefully testing the FAFSA over the next year as we work toward full rollout of the form.”

But the GAO report’s findings are sure to reignite anger over the department’s handling of the new form, just as officials try to steer the national conversation moving forward.

A GAO spokesman said Inside Higher Ed that the office is still studying implementation and reviewing the FAFSA processing system; They expect to complete their work early next year.