Golden Fleece Award

LITTLE ROCK, AR - Rep. French Hill (AR-02) named the United States Department of Education (ED) as the latest recipient of his Golden Fleece Award, once again, for new revelations about their mistakes in their rollout of the 2024-2025 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and concerns that their incapacity to address these outstanding issues will result in lower enrollments and applications for federal financial aid in the 2025-2026 academic year.

Rep. Hill said, “Earlier this year, I awarded a Golden Fleece to the Department of Education for their failure to meet deadlines in providing students, parents, colleges, and more with the FAFSA application. Recent reports, however, have shed light onto how truly horrendous some of their errors were. Students born in the year 2000 could not complete the form, and applicants who needed translation services were told to call a call center that wouldn’t answer and press a number that didn’t exist to seek the assistance they needed. The Department is not taking enough action to correct their errors, and that is simply unacceptable. Student applications and enrollments for this fall suffered as a result, and the Department has no plans on how to re-engage the students who missed out on the chance for higher education this fall because of their mishandling of the FAFSA last year. I am worried that we will see many of these same missteps happen again, which is inexcusable and unfair to the low-income and first-generation students who need financial aid the most."

In a letter to ED Secretary Miguel Cardona, Rep. Hill writes:

I write today to inform you that the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is the most recent recipient of my Golden Fleece Award. I am once again awarding this to ED for your department’s excessive number of failures during the rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for the 2024-2025 academic year. As I have learned more about your department’s management of this implementation and its impact on students, I have come to share many of the concerns that these issues will not be corrected ahead of the 2025-2026 academic year application process and your management will further deter students from pursuing higher education because of an inability to access federal financial assistance.

Despite being initially passed in December 2021, Congress worked with ED to delay implementation of a new streamlined application process for student financial aid to the 2024-2025 academic year. Students and their families have been traditionally able to begin their FAFSA applications on October 1 of the year proceeding the upcoming academic year; yet, the form for the 2024-2025 FAFSA was not released until December 30, 2023. Students were only able to access the form for less than an hour during the first two days, and the application was not consistently online until January 7, 2024, already leaving students, colleges, guidance counselors, and others about 100 days behind schedule. Not only was this initial delay itself problematic, but additional issues, timeline delays, and a lack of communication from the department further exacerbated the predicament faced by students, their families, and schools.

Per your department’s publicly posted Issue Alerts, ED identified at least 40 separate technical issues with the initial rollout that range from blocking completion of or even starting the FAFSA application, deleting already entered information, providing erroneous messages, and misestimating students’ eligibility for aid. Perhaps the most outrageous of these issues is that applicants who were born in the year 2000 could not progress in their online applications after entering that information and were prevented from submitting their application. As of today, more than 20 issues are still considered “open”.

For mixed-status families – families who have a parent or spouse without a Social Security number, only 15 and 40 percent were able to have their identities verified automatically, depending on when they attempted to validate themselves. This was an essential component of the FAFSA simplification efforts to allow ED to access family financial information directly from the IRS and is an early step in the application process, past which applicants cannot continue. Since electronic verifications did not work for a majority of these applicants, individuals had to be manually verified. 219,000 individuals ended up needing to go through this burdensome and time-consuming process, yet ED only planned, staffed, and committed resources for 3,500 individuals to be manually verified. Eventually, procedures that prohibited students from accessing the remainder of the application had to be scraped to allow students to do so, although ED plans to reinstate this initial verification requirement for the upcoming cycle.

Additionally, ED’s call center, the main resource for applicants who needed assistance to complete and submit their FAFSA applications, received the 5.4 million calls during the first 5 months of the FAFSA rollout, of which 4 million went unanswered. In fact, the call center answered both fewer calls than the department estimated the call center could handle and fewer calls than it did in the previous cycle. Moreover, ED is required to make the FAFSA available in 11 of the most common languages but currently only offers it in English and Spanish. However, students and family members were directed by ED to request translation services through the call center, only to find that the instructions on ED’s website told them to contact the call center and press the number 7, which is not a valid phone tree option. Your department still does not have plans for developing any additional translations, and additional translations will not be available this cycle.

Ultimately, your department’s lack of communication was the most severe issue. ED did not communicate directly with applicants about: the status of submitted applications – both for those that faced delays in getting processed and those that had been completed; confirmation of the department’s receipt of paper applications and subsequent processing delays; details for why someone received an error message; other proactive messages and steps that applicants could take to resolve the issues; and updates to changes in an applicant’s aid eligibility and amounts. This last example is critically important because applicants receive an immediate estimated student aid index that estimates how much financial support they will need and the amount of Pell grants they may receive upon filing their FAFSA application. After making the FAFSA live, ED belatedly adjusted their calculations to account for inflation and then failed to notify students who had already submitted their FAFSA application of this development as well as students whose aid eligibility had been recalculated due to other errors. While ED officials plan to expand communication efforts, as of late September, this plan was still incomplete. Many students were forced to commit to decisions about where to attend college before receiving financial aid offers. While some colleges pushed back their decision dates to accommodate prospective students, others did not.

Your department’s poor communication also affected the colleges who bear the responsibility of providing accurate offers of financial assistance to students. Beyond missing multiple deadlines to deliver colleges the tools and student records they need to calculate aid, ED also repeatedly delayed providing colleges with the functionality to correct student applications – a function typically available when the FAFSA goes live. On July 30, 2024, the department finally announced that it would not provide these batch corrections at all, forcing colleges to submit individual corrections through a manual process which had only became available on June 30, 2024. Since colleges must have correct student records before disbursing financial aid, as a result of this manual corrections process, some colleges have been unable to disburse aid on time, causing students to decrease their courseload or opt out of college altogether. Colleges no longer trust your department to communicate with the about timelines.

I am especially troubled to hear that applications for high school seniors and other first-time applicants were down 9 percent from the previous year, which largely impacted the less wealthy and first-generation students and families who most need the FAFSA to make decisions about which colleges they can afford to attend. Moreover, 1.6 million students started but did not complete an application, and your department does not have a strategy for the upcoming cycle to re-engage these students who encountered roadblocks and are now no longer on course to obtain higher education. We know that the longer it takes a student and their family to complete the application, the less likely they are finish it. This is blatantly unacceptable and will likely result in fewer applications once again.

While I want to commend your department for opening the FAFSA form to all applicants during expanded beta testing on November 18, 2024, ahead of the official December 1 opening and for your efforts to reduce the submission gap by approximately million applicants over the summer, ED’s lack of actions to address the issues that led to these problems occurring in the first place is disturbing. I would like to know what actions ED is taking to ensure that this year’s FAFSA application process is not riddled with the same issues that plagued it last year, particularly regarding planned communications and outreach to students, their families, college, high school guidance counselors, and others.

I am committed to ensuring effective fiscal practices at our Nation’s federal agencies. Should you require any additional authority from Congress to address these concerns, I urge you to notify us as soon as possible. I would also welcome any technical assistance you could provide to Congress to correct statutory issues that may have contributed to this problem. Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to working with you to address this important issue.