WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) – Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are working to improve future rollouts of the federal student aid form known as the FAFSA.
It comes after the Department of Education botched its rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid last year. The application helps high schoolers get financial aid for college.
“FAFSA isn’t just a form. It’s a path to postsecondary education,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said Friday.
Delays and technical errors led to about 430,000 fewer submissions, now Congress is stepping in.
“We passed this bill that I’m sponsoring, the FAFSA Deadline Act, that is going to tell the Department of Education ‘You need to get your act together,'” Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) said.
California Congressman Kevin Kiley’s bill moves up the deadline from January to October for when the Department of Education has to publish the FAFSA.
It passed the House Friday almost unanimously.
“It’s a commitment to ensuring that students and parents have access to the resources they need to pursue higher education,” Rep. Erica Lee Carter (D-Texas) said.
The Department of Education said in a statement that it’s “on track” to return to a regular launch date of October 1 in 2025.
In a statement from the Department’s Under Secretary James Kvaal, the agency is confident in this year’s FAFSA for the 2025-26 school year, which is now available online, writing:
“We have a fully functioning site and a form working end-to-end that has been successfully submitted by more than 10,000 students…”
“I wish I was confident. But we’ve seen them drop the ball so many times now that, really, it would be almost naive to say that suddenly they’re going to get it right,” Rep. Kiley said.
The bill now heads to the Senate, where Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine says he hopes it passes quickly.
“A lot of families have been very inconvenienced and not just families, but universities have been inconvenienced in the sense of families not knowing what they might have in the way of financial aid,” Kaine said.
