FAFSA has struggled for years. Then Trump cut the Education Department in half
Families and students are growing nervous about the fate of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) amid President Trump's massive cuts to the Department of Education and his plans to do away with it entirely.
FAFSA has had a rough couple of years, starting with a clumsy rollout of revamped forms during the Biden administration that led to a drop in the college aid applications.
But even amid a need to rebuild trust with parents and applicants, the Trump administration has halved the Department of Education, and the agency has seen multiple high-level retirements including this week the chief operating officer for the Office of Federal Student Aid.
As of March 17, the Education Department marked more than 8 million completed FAFSA forms so far, an increase of 50 percent from those submitted by the same time last year.
'We have concerns that when students and families hear that the Department of Education is being dismantled or shutting down […] they might hear and we have concerns that they take that to mean that there won't be a FAFSA, that there won't be a Pell Grant, that as the department goes away, Federal Student Aid goes away,' said Kim Cook, chief executive officer of the National College Attainment Network (NCAN).
'We've been working very hard with our members and the message to our students that even if there is disruption or change, Federal Student Aid, FAFSA, Pell Grants continue,' Cook added.
Students technically have until June 30 to complete the FAFSA forms, and schools are processing the forms they have received so far from the Education Department. But many high schoolers receive college acceptance letters in early spring and have to make a decision on where to go to by May 1.
NCAN, which tracks completed FAFSA applications by high school seniors, says that while completions for the 2025-2026 school year are ahead of where they were a year ago, they are still lagging behind the 2023-2024 FAFSA cycle.
Around 42 percent of current high school seniors had completed the applications through March 21, significantly better than last year but behind the class of 2023 at this point.
Last year's FAFSA cycle turned into chaos as the Biden administration attempted to simplify the forms, which determine an individual's student aid needs and ability to get a Pell Grant.
While a reformed FAFSA application was celebrated, the rollout was shaky. The opening of the applications was months behind and once it was up, glitches prevented many from completing the forms in a timely fashion.
'The Department has been extraordinarily transparent on FAFSA unlike the previous Administration who left hundreds of thousands of students in the dark when the form was down for months,' a spokesperson for the department said.
At the end, colleges last year had to move back their decision days past May 1 due to the delay and the number of completed applications did not reach that of previous years.
'We're cautiously optimistic that the work that was done through the summer and through the fall to get FAFSA in a good place for the launch of this year's application stays in place and is appropriately staffed,' Cook said.
There was an outage to the FAFSA site after the department laid off half its workforce, although the federal agency said it was the result of a firewall misconfiguration put into the system in November that conflicted with a new update.
The Trump administration has repeatedly insisted that its moves against the Education Department will not harm its congressionally mandated policies.
'I want to assure you that continuity of operations for Federal Student Aid (FSA) is both a statutory and critical function of the Department. Accordingly, no employees working on core functions of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or student loan servicing were impacted by the RIF,' Acting Under Secretary James Bergeron said in a stakeholder letter March 14.
Karen McCarthy, vice president for public policy and federal relations for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said there were no FAFSA employees terminated as part of the Trump layoffs but that some at the FSA offices who help the process for giving out student aid were let go.
'While they may not have directly impacted the FAFSA team, there may be other offices, other departments within federal student aid that do some FAFSA support work, and those teams have been impacted,' McCarthy said.
Reports have emerged that dozens of staffers in FSA's technology services had to be rehired after the mass layoffs.
'They seem to understand the importance of the FAFSA being open and available, and we saw during the layoffs that no employees that work directly on the FAFSA team were let go, but we do still have concerns in that we're not quite sure that everybody within the administration has a full understanding, yet, since they're so new, about all of the pieces to the FAFSA and the infrastructure that supports the FAFSA,' McCarthy said.
Senate Democrats have opened an investigation into reports the Department of Government Efficiency is looking to replace some contract workers for the Education Department with AI chatbots. The idea would be for AI chatbots to take over call centers that field thousands of questions a day, including from families and students about FAFSA.
Advocates say it is important for students, families and financial officers to have full transparency of what's going on when announcements are made by the president that other programs such as student loans and initiatives for students with disabilities are getting moved to other parts of the federal government.
'This disruption and uncertainty piece, it's sort of a theme here […] we know that there were massive reductions in force at the Department of Education, but we don't know where, which departments, who, what the thinking was behind that,' Cook said.
'So, the more that we can understand what they are, we can react, and the more that we understand what they are, we can tell students and families,' she added. 'For example, whether this happened to FAFSA staffing, we're really not in a place where we can say that with clarity or certainty now, because it hasn't been so transparent.'
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