Several weeks ago my sister happened to visit friends in Chimney Rock, North Carolina, a small town 20 miles from Asheville. From the cabin where she was staying she could look down on Chimney Rock’s charming main street, and on Wednesday she spent the afternoon exploring a number of its shops. Two days later downtown Chimney Rock no longer existed, the only remnants a debris field that had been washed into Lake Lure by raging storm waters from Hurricane Helene.
During her last reelection campaign, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer adopted a simple campaign slogan that turned into a meme, “Fix the Damn Roads!” The slogan came from a constituent’s response when Whitmer asked what government could be doing to help the average person.
The notion that elected officials should be focused on solving problems and governing well seems quaint and almost unrecognizable in our current political climate, where partisan posturing and political theater have become the dominant values. But we have two recent examples of why we need government leaders to adopt the problem-solving mindset.
Disaster relief falls at the top of the list. Only the federal government has the resources to respond to the devastation wreaked upon the Southeast by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. The unprecedented size and reach of both storms makes that abundantly clear. We knew that the coastal areas of Florida were imperiled, but no one foresaw that Asheville, North Carolina would end up being the epicenter of hurricane damage.
You would think that if there is an issue that could unite us as a country, it would be assisting those dealing with a tragedy like the hurricane. And you’d be wrong. In the aftermath of Helene we have seen an explosion of storm-related conspiracy theories and lies. FEMA is not confiscating your house if you sign up for assistance. Chimney Rock was not destroyed to mine lithium. “They” don’t control the weather.
Of even greater concern are attempts to weaken government’s ability to respond to disasters like Helene. Plans like Project 2025 propose cutting back disaster relief funding for FEMA and privatizing some of the functions traditionally taken on by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service. Why? Because acknowledgment of the need for those agencies as we seem to be experiencing “thousand year” weather events annually makes it harder to deny climate change.
The second recent issue was a Government Accounting Office report to Congress on the issues underlying the rollout of the “new and improved” FAFSA last year. That also qualifies as a disaster, but a man-made one. The GAO found numerous examples of incompetence and failure to anticipate and address problems led to the numerous roadblocks encountered by students, their families, and financial-aid professionals.
In case a GAO report is not your idea of light reading, you have a nerdy friend in the blogosphere who has perused the report. What follows is a quick summary of the issues (with apologies to those of you who encountered them first hand in working with students or at an institutional level and remain traumatized).
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The issues identified by the GAO fall into two categories. There are technical issues, most of which shouldn’t have been a surprise. The Department of Education had identified 25 “key requirements” for the launch of the new form, but when it was released 18 of the 25 had not been met. Two of those included the ability to determine an applicant’s final federal-aid eligibility and the capability to send results to college financial-aid offices. Both of those would seem rather important.
By last March the DOE had identified 55 unresolved technical defects, some of them categorized as “critical,” but twenty remained unresolved as recently as early September.
A number of parents couldn’t get past the first section of the application, meaning that students had to submit a new form. As of early September, that hadn’t been fixed. Other students and parents returned to a saved application only to discover that their signatures had disappeared (also not resolved). And until March 8, 69 days after the FAFSA went live, for some reason students born in the year 2000 couldn’t complete the application beyond a certain point.
The students experiencing the greatest difficulties were those with parents or spouses without a Social Security number. Not only were more than half in that group rejected for missing signatures, but they were also required to go through a manual verification process to determine their eligibility for federal funds. There were two major manual verification issues. One is that the office overseeing the FAFSA dramatically, maybe even unbelievably, underestimated the number of students who would require manual verification. The government’s estimate was 3500, whereas the actual number ended up being 219,000. The other issue was that families had to email documents rather than upload them onto an online portal, which does a better job of identifying documents and evaluating clarity.
I am not a techie, so I have some sympathy for the technology challenges. The GAO suggests that in the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA)’s haste to meet the Congressionally-mandated deadline for releasing the updated FAFSA, it failed to develop either an infrastructure or a timeline to test adequately the various components. In particular, the GAO stated that the FSA failed to “ensure bidirectional traceability between high-level and lower-level detailed requirements.” I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound good.
I have far less patience with the second set of issues related to communication. As early as August of 2022, the FSA knew that the 2024-25 release would likely be delayed, but it didn’t announce that publicly for another seven months. That is inexcusable. Being forthright about the delays earlier may not have made the rollout any easier, but it would have led to more realistic expectations and less frustration.
The FSA contracted with four vendors to staff call centers for those needing assistance, but during the first five months the call centers were supposedly up and running, four million of the 5.4 million calls went unanswered. It is estimated that more than half of those attempting to seek help did not have at least one call answered. Even when they got through, call center representatives were advised to tell students to “try again later” rather than taking steps to notify them when a particular problem was resolved. The Department of Education did not inform any of the 3.5 million who initially submitted the FAFSA until February of 2024 that their forms had not been processed. There seems to have been no plan in place to communicate with those already in the system about their status or issues that had been corrected.
Providing timely and accurate information would seem to be the minimal expectation for government in serving constituents. In the case of the FAFSA, that is even more important, for three reasons. The students and their families needing help and accurate information include many who are vulnerable and don’t understand a process that is confusing and anxiety-producing. For many students, the ability to access financial aid is essential to their ability to go to college. And a failure to communicate accurately and effectively empowers those who seek to wreak havoc with conspiracy theories.
Last week former President Trump talked about abolishing the Department of Education if elected, perhaps maintaining a Secretary who would be concerned with whether English and arithmetic are being taught and “wokeness” not taught. In such a scenario, what happens to federal education funding, including fixing the FAFSA process?
The GAO report included seven recommendations moving forward. It appears that many of them are already in the works as the FSA engages in early testing of the system it never did a year ago.
Develop an outreach strategy to identify and connect with students who did not submit a FAFSA during this cycle.
Address remaining technical issues and streamline process.
Make identity verification more efficient for students who have a parent or spouse with no Social Security number.
Improve translation services and support for languages other than English and Spanish.
Hire sufficient staff to increase call center capacity.
Develop plan to provide FAFSA applicants with timely updates on status of applications and technical solutions.
Communicate more effectively with colleges and other stakeholders.
The GAO recommendations all make sense, but could be boiled down to one simple slogan borrowed from Gretchen Whitmer. Something like “Fix the damn FAFSA.”