Wednesday, January 18, 2023

DOE wants to modernize the student loan program but mucks up the planning process

Like a repentant boozer who promises to give up drinking, the Department of Education pledged to modernize its neanderthal student loan program. Unfortunately, like a chronic drunk, DOE simply can't clean up its act.

DOE's own Inspector General audited the Department's modernization efforts and issued a report last week.  The audit concluded that DOE bungled its modernization job.  

Typical of a government document, the Inspector General's report is written in govspeak and is almost incomprehensible.  Here's just one sentence from the audit report, which I urge you not to read:
FSA not completing the required or applicable planning steps or following best practices for acquisition planning for the Next Gen projects we reviewed may have contributed to the stakeholders’ misunderstandings regarding scope, project requirements, and stakeholder needs; and to multiple changes to some of the projects’ solicitations, multiple bid protests, budget deficiencies, and poorly scoped solutions that FSA described in its Summary of Lessons Learned for the Next Gen Enhanced Processing Solution and Interim Servicing Solution projects and in FSA’s Fiscal Year 2023 Congressional Budget Request.

Fortunately, Katherine Knott, an Inside Higher Ed reporter, understands govspeak and translated the auditor's report into plain English. In a nutshell, Knot reported that DOE "didn't follow best practices in budgeting, planning and managing the modernization of its student loan system." Knott also wrote that DOE's Office of Student Aid "didn't complete budget requests for many components of the modernization until after the bid solicitations were issued."Apparently, senior DOE officials couldn't even agree on the modernization initiative's objectives.

As we might expect, DOE's officials had a govspeak excuse for the screwup. Stakeholders, including Congress, were confused and frustrated due in part to "inadequately defined changes in strategy and a failure to account for constituent feedback."

In short, DOE's bumbling effort to modernize its byzantine student loan program ended in a SNAFU: Situation Normal; All Fucked Up."

Hey, man. The situation is normal



3 comments:

  1. Software upgrades are always fraught with difficulties. The OIG analysis could apply to dozens, if not hundreds, of similarly plagued system conversions. There are legacy systems like this everywhere and fixing them is unbelievably challenging. My wife was involved with Florida's FLARE ERP upgrade that had to be aborted before it could be implemented.
    The complexity of computer systems that are relied upon in real time accounts for the unexpected consequences when something in the background, behind the screens, changes, even a little. It's not so much the government or its govspeak that's the problem -- these systems are so old and under-resourced -- and complicated that managers have forgotten how bad it can get.
    A recent example, Southwest Airlines left 1,000,000 passengers stranded when their computer system went down.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Southwest_Airlines_flight_delays
    Simply put, their complexity now dwarfs human- or team-scaling, making them unmanageable and leaving us at their mercy.
    Unfortunately, this also applies to how we manage our power grid, the supply chain, and respond to disasters, not just FSA.

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  2. You make a fair point about the complexity of software and systems designed to handle massive data. Screwups like the Southwest Airlines fiasco can happen without anyone being negligent. However, I was struck by the OIG's comment that the principal stakeholders on the Next Gen project didn't have shared goals or agreed-upon expectations.
    In my view, the best thing DOE could do to make the repayment process work better for student debtors would be to link individual student-loan portfolios to borrowers' tax returns so that borrowers would not be required to recertify their income year after year.

    Millions of people are in income-based repayment plans, which means their loan payments vary from year to year due to changes in income. DOE should calculate payment amounts based on the income certified in individual tax returns.

    Thanks for writing. Ricvhard

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  3. "In my view, the best thing DOE could do to make the repayment process work better for student debtors would be to link individual student-loan portfolios to borrowers' tax returns so that borrowers would not be required to recertify their income year after year." Agreed.
    US DOL, in fact, now has a data sharing partnership with the IRS for enforcement of overtime regulations, resulting in 1,300,000 new overtime eligibilities. Without good data such as this, US ED "lists" are nothing more than the blind leading the blind.

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