Future historians may struggle to wrap their heads around how the effort to simplify a financial-aid application form turned into one of the biggest debacles in modern federal government history.

On Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) unveiled the findings of their investigation into how the Education Department botched the launch of an updated Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the form which prospective college students seeking Pell Grants or student loans must complete. The findings, released in two reports and presented at a hearing on Tuesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee, paint a picture of an Education Department that completely lost control of what should have been a fairly straightforward task.

A cascade of delays

Back in 2020, Congress directed the Department to pare down the overlong FAFSA and simplify the formulas used to award federal aid. Though Congress gave the Department until late 2023 to prepare the new form, it missed the traditional October 1 FAFSA launch date by 90 days. That delay, which was the public’s first inkling that something had gone terribly wrong, turned out to be the least of the FAFSA’s problems.

Over the next few months, the Department missed milestone after milestone. The Department did not begin processing electronic FAFSA records until March 10 of this year, a delay of 161 days. Paper forms did not start processing until August 1, a delay of 305 days. Those delays meant that colleges did not have the information needed to make timely financial aid offers. Many students had to commit to schools without knowing what they would pay.

Yet the students who could submit their forms were the lucky ones. There were over 40 technical problems with the FAFSA, some of which remain unresolved. “These issues included problems that blocked some students from completing the application—or in some cases prevented them from starting it,” writes GAO official Melissa Emrey-Arras. “Other issues include deleting information applicants entered into the form, providing erroneous error messages, and providing incorrect estimates of students’ eligibility for federal aid.”

One inexplicable error meant that students who were born in the year 2000 remained stuck on a certain page on the online FAFSA—rendering them unable to apply for aid. The snafu led former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to remark that “only the federal government is capable of making the Y2K bug still be a thing.”

Three-quarters of help calls went unanswered

Students could hardly rely on help from the federal government. Frustrated applicants placed 5.4 million calls to the Department during the first five months of the FAFSA launch. Four million of those calls (nearly three-quarters) went unanswered. GAO reports that the Department had planned for less than half the actual call volume and critically understaffed the call center.

The Department’s poor planning is evident in other respects. Students or parents who required translation services were instructed to press “7.” “But when someone calls the call center line,” Emrey-Arras writes, “the number 7 is not a phone tree option.”

The Department also failed to keep lists of students who needed help with a technical issue, in order to notify them when the issue had been fixed. Students had to manually check the electronic FAFSA repeatedly to see if their problem had been resolved. Internal guidance instructed call-center representatives to tell frustrated students simply to “try again later.”

As a result, the new FAFSA took first-time applicants a median of five days to complete. Traditionally, students have been able to complete and submit the FAFSA in a single sitting. The delays and technical problems, though, meant that “counselors needed multiple one-on-one support sessions with both the student and parents, which were difficult to coordinate.”

Some students never finished at all. The Department reported receiving 432,000 fewer FAFSAs for the current academic year than it did during the previous cycle. Applications from high school seniors and other first-time applicants dropped by nine percent relative to last year. Low- and middle-income students accounted for the bulk of the decline. Many analysts expect this will translate to a significant drop in college enrollment this fall.

What happened?

How did the FAFSA launch go so wrong? GAO lays the blame at the Department’s feet. In addition to insufficient long-term planning and deficient oversight of contractors, the Department fell down on the job when it came to testing the new FAFSA on actual users. The Department moved ahead with user testing “even though significant work had not been completed.” This meant that the limited testing that was done failed to identify many of the problems that would crop up when the Department rolled out the new FAFSA to the public.

Moreover, GAO reports that the Department “did not test the initial system as a whole with actual end users (e.g., student and parent applicants, and colleges) prior to deploying the system to all users.” It’s no wonder so many errors went unremarked until the form had gone live.

Though the Department’s defenders have pointed the finger at insufficient funding from Congress to ensure a smooth launch, GAO’s reports make no mention of this. Asked about funding at Tuesday’s hearing, Emrey-Arras noted that funding to hire more staff “was not something the Department raised with us.”

The rollout for next year’s FAFSA has already been delayed for two months, while more than 20 technical issues with the form remain as of last month. But rather than cooperating with GAO to ensure the launch of next year’s form goes smoothly, the Department has been stonewalling the watchdog. When GAO requested documents from the Department as part of its investigation, it took five months and a Congressional subpoena for the Department to supply the requested information.

Rather than following through on their Congressionally-authorized duties, senior officials at the Education Department seem to have spent more time plotting to forgive student loans. The GAO reports have revealed the consequences of their inattention to more prosaic matters. Unfortunately, most of those consequences have fallen on America’s students.