Less than a year into her term, Education Secretary Linda McMahon has pulled off a feat her predecessor failed to accomplish for two years running: publish a functional, streamlined Free Application for Federal Student Aid by Oct. 1.
What Secretary Miguel Cardona could not do in three years, McMahon did in nine months, with half the staff, and against the backdrop of a government shutdown.
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Filling out the FAFSA is a bureaucratic rite of passage that nearly every college student must complete once a year. Without it, students cannot access any federal student aid, including federal loans, Pell grants, and Parent PLUS loans.
Completing the FAFSA should be easy and uneventful. Congress acknowledged this in 2020, when it directed the Department of Education to shrink the number of questions and streamline the formula for calculating aid eligibility by Oct. 1, 2023.
The original deadline came and went without a new FAFSA, and without a FAFSA at all. Fixated on unlawfully canceling student loans rather than legally administering them, the prior administration delivered a glitchy, broken FAFSA three months behind schedule.
The form locked some students out, mistakenly rejected some of their submissions, and failed to save the progress of still more. Those who tried calling Federal Student Aid for help were often out of luck: A Government Accountability Office report found that 4 million calls, out of a total of 5.4 million, simply “went unanswered.” The problems were so pervasive that many students gave up trying to complete the form.
One month after the disastrous launch, the Education Department announced a delay in processing the completed forms. Then, in March 2024, department officials discovered 70,000 unopened emails that contained data needed to process FAFSAs. Shortly afterward, the department confessed that it had processed more than 200,000 forms incorrectly by failing accurately to account for students’ financial assets.
This tragic comedy of errors left colleges with little time to prepare financial aid offers, meaning students had little time to evaluate them. For teenagers headed off to college, the prior administration’s incompetence hamstrung the biggest financial decision of their lives.
McMahon inherited a mess and cleaned it up within her first year on the job, with half the staff of her predecessor. Her department began beta testing its version of the FAFSA in August and released it to the public at large in late September. So far, students have not reported any widespread problems.
Had the Biden-Harris administration fixed the FAFSA, it would have been lauded for overcoming the problems it caused. Instead, the prior administration squandered its last opportunity for an on-time release. Last year, it rolled out a streamlined FAFSA two months behind the expected launch date.
The new Trump administration has released the first timely FAFSA since 2022 and made it more efficient, too. The online system now verifies students’ identities instantly — a major upgrade from the previous three-day wait. The latest FAFSA also makes it easier for students to invite their parents to contribute.
Because this bit of management magic has come from the Trump team, there won’t be any media fanfare. The legacy media will never acknowledge that McMahon solved the problem or admit the prior administration created it.
The FAFSA remains up and running, even when the government is not. At the start of the shutdown, Federal Student Aid announced that most of its “processors, contact centers, and websites remain functional.”
The Trump administration’s success proves that a better FAFSA was always possible. It simply wasn’t the last administration’s priority. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when the people in charge are concerned with administering Federal Student Aid as is written in the law, not as a free money giveaway to buy votes.
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The success of this year’s FAFSA launch should also help dispel the myth that a trimmed-down Department of Education simply cannot fulfill its obligations as defined by Congress.
As the new FAFSA hums along in the background of the higher education application cycle, it represents an important win for college-bound students. What’s more, this win has proved that a trimmed-down federal bureaucracy can do just as well as, or even better than, what came before.
Angela Morabito is the spokeswoman for the Defense of Freedom Institute and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. She is a former Department of Education press secretary.