Washington, D.C. - In case you missed it, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a senior member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, questioned Melissa Emrey-Arras, Director of Education, Workforce, and Income Security Issues at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) about the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing failures in implementing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) program harming our students and their families as they pursue their higher education goals.
Watch her line of questioning here.
Read a full transcript of her line of questioning below:
Congresswoman Stefanik: The Biden-Harris Department of Education FAFSA disaster has harmed students and families, in many cases irreparably, across the country. We’ve spoken, my office has spoken with many families in Northern New York. They are concerned about the fallout and downstream ripple effects of the FAFSA delay, including talking with parents worrying that their child’s scholarship will be revoked as they try to afford college. This is on top of the historic inflation crisis that is painful for families with an average median income in my district of about forty-five to fifty thousand dollars and we know this problem was avoidable, and this misstep has led to the largest decline in applications coming from low-income students, in some cases, removing the opportunity for those kids to go to college. So, I want to focus on the GAO investigation, and just to verify some of the findings here. While the department claimed that it took an average fifteen to twenty minutes to fill out the FAFSA application, the investigation found that it took a two-parent household an average of nine and a half days to complete. Is that correct?
Melissa Emrey-Arras: That is correct for parents that file their taxes separately. It took nine and a half days.
Congresswoman Stefanik: Nine and a half days. Nearly three quarters of calls to the department’s call center went unanswered in the first five months of the rollout. Is that correct?
Melissa Emrey-Arras: Unfortunately, it is.
Congresswoman Stefanik: And the department inexplicably cut its call center staff compared to the previous year and they, in fact, ended up receiving twice as many total calls. Is that correct?
Melissa Emrey-Arras: That is correct.
Congresswoman Stefanik: The department also refused to provide students information on the status of their applications or solutions to technical problems for months telling many to just ‘Try again later.’ Is that correct?
Melissa Emrey-Arras: That is correct.
Congresswoman Stefanik: This obviously is very, very frustrating for families. My question is: what students and families were hurt the most by these FAFSA delays?
Melissa Emrey-Arras: It was the lower income and middle-income families. Families that have wealth that do not need federal aid could care less about the FAFSA. It didn’t affect them. They could pick whatever college they wanted to, but for everyone else, which is most Americans, it was extremely difficult, and the folks that were hurt the most were the most low income. For the independent students, that was individuals making thirty thousand dollars or less, had the steepest declines in FAFSA submissions. For dependent applicants, thinking like high school seniors, it was for families with incomes between thirty and forty-eight thousand dollars. So these are the families that are being affected. These are the families that need education to help achieve an economic future.
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