Federal Reports

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) Simplification Act made several changes to the FAFSA, including changing the formula for determining student financial assistance need and simplifying the application. The rollout of the redesigned 2024–2025 FAFSA application encountered issues that affected students’ ability to apply for aid. The Department of Education (Department) has also introduced several student loan forgiveness initiatives, including an initial debt relief plan, the Student Debt Relief loan discharge program, and the Saving on a Valuable Education Plan. As a result of Congressional concerns related to resources spent on these initiatives, we initiated a review to determine whether the Department’s Federal Student Aid (FSA) office could account for resources expended under these initiatives.  We conducted an inspection to determine if (1) for the FAFSA Simplification Act and student loan forgiveness initiatives, FSA has prepared accountings of appropriated funds, obligations, administrative expenses, and staffing for fiscal years (FY) 2021–2024; and (2) FSA provided Congress with detailed spend plans of anticipated uses of funds made available under the FYs 2021–2024 appropriations laws. We found that FSA does not have readily available full accountings of appropriated funds, obligations, administrative expenses, and staffing related to its FAFSA Simplification Act and student loan forgiveness initiatives for FYs 2021–2024. We also found that FSA provided spend plans to Congress from FYs 2021–2024 as required by the respective appropriations acts, though FSA’s initial submissions to Congress were late in all four fiscal years. Additionally, one of the required subsequent quarterly updates was not submitted in FY 2023, and another quarterly update was late in FY 2024. We also found that the spend plans provided limited information specific to the use of funds for FSA’s FAFSA Simplification Act and student loan forgiveness initiatives.

The audit objectives were to determine whether program funds were managed in accordance with the ARC and Federal grant requirements.

In this white paper, the OIG compared postal models across a selection of 26 posts: the U.S. Postal Service and 25 foreign national postal operators. While the Postal Service operates under a unique model that combines flexibility in meeting universal service obligations (USO) with significant constraints (such as stricter pricing regulations, mandated six-day delivery, and limited diversification), many foreign posts enjoy greater commercial freedom. 

For our evaluation of the National Weather Service's (NWS's) protection of operational technology (OT), our objective was to determine whether NWS has implemented effective security controls for its critical OT. We found that I. NWS did not implement strong credential management for some OT systems, and II. NWS lacked complete vulnerability scanning coverage for some OT systems.

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA) requires that the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission annually provide to the appropriate congressional committees the findings, conclusions, and recommendations from our reviews and audits performed under subsection 205(a) of the CPSIA as well actions taken with regard to employee complaints under subsection 205(b). The attached report fulfills these requirements for fiscal year 2024.