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An hours-long outage Wednesday on StudentAid.gov, the federal website for student loans and financial aid, underscored the risks in rapidly gutting the Department of Education, as President Donald Trump aims to dismantle the agency.Hundreds of users reported FAFSA outages to Downdetector starting midday Wednesday, saying they were having trouble completing the form, which is required for financial aid at colleges nationwide. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, a group of people who handle colleges’ financial aid awards, also received reports of users experiencing technical issues and having trouble completing the FAFSA.“We’ve been trying to get more clarity on why it’s down,” said Allie Bidwell Arcese, a spokeswoman for NASFAA. The Education Department hadn’t shared any information on the outage, she said. “The maintenance and troubleshooting may be impacted by yesterday’s layoffs.”The developers and IT support staff who worked on the FAFSA form were hard hit in the Education Department’s layoffs Tuesday, along with staff buyouts and the termination of probationary employees. In all, the Education Department has reduced its staff by half, to roughly 2,000, since Trump took office.A list of laid-off staff obtained and verified by AP shows more than 300 people cut from Federal Student Aid two dozen of them from Federal Student Aid’s technology division. That included the entire team responsible for systems supporting the FAFSA form, a person with knowledge of the outage told The Associated Press, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation. While laid-off staffers are still technically employed until March 21, they had limited access to their email, phones and computers, making a response to the outage difficult, the person said. At one point Wednesday, about 70 people had joined a Teams call to try to pinpoint the cause of the outage.The call continued for hours. By Wednesday evening, the website carried a banner claiming “Planned Maintenance” was underway, and login access was cut off.The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment on the outage.Problems with the FAFSA had vexed the administration of former President Joe Biden, drawing rebuke from Republicans. The form was overhauled last year in an attempt to simplify it, but technical problems blocked students from submitting forms or bungled financial aid calculations.Advocates had feared frustration would lead thousands of students to give up on going to college at all. But overall freshman enrollment at U.S. colleges increased over the previous year. Editor’s note: A previous version of this story said freshman enrollment at U.S. colleges had dropped in fall 2024. That data was corrected in January by the National Student Clearinghouse, which cited an error in its methodology. Freshman enrollment increased over the previous year. The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Collin Binkley and Jocelyn Gecker, AP Education Writers
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E-Commerce
As buzz around womens sports continues to grow, the largest dedicated female sports fund just got larger. Monarch Collective, the first and largest investment platform that exclusively invests in womens sports, announced Thursday that it has expanded its fund size from $150 million to $250 million. The increased capital will allow the fund to capitalize on what it calls a rapidly accelerating market: womens professional sports teams that have been increasingly filling seats. Since launching our fund last year, womens sports has experienced a cultural transcendence and the ecosystem has evolved dramatically, making the need for operational, value-added capital even more important than it once was, said Kara Nortman, managing partner of Monarch Collective, in a statement. Now is the time to build the right community around the table and deploy new playbooks that will win. Big-name investors on board The fund touts high-profile investors, who contributed to the majority of the new infusion of capital. According to a press release, they include Melinda French Gatess Pivotal Ventures; Hello Sunshine CEO Sarah Harden; and Beth Brooke, former global vice chairman of public policy at EY. The growth of Monarch Collective aligns with an increased interest in womens sports more broadly. Over the last few years, viewership of games has soared alongside merchandise sales and tickets sold. Last year, the National Womens Soccer League (NWSL) reached 2 million total attendance. Monarchs current profile includes three NWSL teams: Angel City Football Club, BOS Nation FC, and the San Diego Wave FC. But the main driver of this womens sports boom is basketball at both the collegiate and professional level. Last year, Caitlin Clark mania drove record-shattering viewership and revenue toward the Womens March Madness tournament last year. The womens championship game was the most-watched basketball game on ESPN since 2019among all mens, womens, collegiate, and professional games. And ever since Clark joined the WNBA for the 2024 season, that league has more than tripled its number of sell-outs. ‘Meaningful change’ This year, get ready for the hype around women’s sports to continue. Womens March Madness begins next Wednesday, and sports-centric X accounts have already begun to share their excitement about seeing stars like Paige Bueckers and JuJu Watkins playing on national television. Some may say were at a pivotal moment in womens sports, but to us, its much bigger than that, said Jasmine Robinson, managing partner of Monarch Collective, in a statement. Along with our investors, we believe we have the power to drive meaningful change that is representative of todays diverse ownership groups, management teams, and fan bases.
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E-Commerce
Mia Francis, a 22-year-old barista from Boston, filed her taxes on her own this year for the first time, using a free government tax filing program that made it easy because it did most of the work for her.Francis said it took 45 minutes to finish her taxes with the IRS Direct File program, an electronic tax return filing system that the IRS made permanent last year and that has rolled out to 25 states.Francis is expecting a $530 refund. And because she saved cash by not using a commercial tax preparation company to file her taxes, “that money will go a long way,” she said. She plans to use it for a trip to Amsterdam this year.Despite its popularity with Francis and other members of the American public, the IRS Direct File’s fate remains unclear as Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency cleave their way through the federal bureaucracy. So far, the program is still available for use ahead of the April 15 tax filing deadline, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent committed during his January confirmation hearing to maintaining it, at least for this tax season.Representatives from the Internal Revenue Service and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press on their plans for Direct File. But one Republican tax expert says the IRS never got congressional authorization to create Direct File. And Republican lawmakers and commercial tax preparation firms complain the program is a waste of money because free filing programs already exist, although they are hard to use.Direct File was rolled out as a pilot program in 2024 after the IRS was tasked with looking into how to create a “direct file” system as part of the money it received from the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022. Last May, the agency announced that the program would be made permanent.The IRS accepted 140,803 returns filed by taxpayers using Direct File in the 12 states where it was available last tax season. It’s been expanded to include half the country this year. It is unclear how many taxpayers have used Direct File this year.Merici Vinton, an original architect of Direct File from the U.S. Digital Service, noted the ease and accessibility of the program and called it “a great example of how people should interact with the government in the 21st century.”“We effectively launched a startup in the IRS,” she said. “It was built by an in-house product team, in an iterative manner, and we ship updates to the software to improve user experience in real time based on feedback. If we continue to invest in it, both taxpayers and the IRS can benefit.”Musk posted last month on his social media site that he had “deleted” 18F, a government agency that worked on technology projects such as the IRS’ Direct File program. This led to some confusion about whether Direct File is still available to taxpayers. However, conversations inside the IRS indicate that no decision has been made on whether to cut the program, two people familiar with these conversations tell the AP.Former IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, who oversaw the rollout of the program, said Treasury officials considering the future of the program should take into account “the voice of the taxpayers.”“My reflection is that taxpayers are in very different situations and have very different preferences for how they want to file,” he said. “Those whose preference is to file electronically direct with the IRS for free, it’s a good option to have on the menu. But it should not replace other options.”Derrick Plummer, a spokesperson for Intuit, one of the country’s largest commercial tax preparation firms, said free tax preparation had been available for years before Direct File came along.“IRS Direct File is a solution in search of a problem, a waste of taxpayer dollars and a drain on critical IRS resources,” he said. A June 2024 Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report estimates that the annual costs of Direct File may range from $64 million to $249 million.“The IRS should focus on its core mission including data privacy and customer service while policymakers in Washington focus on simplifying the tax code,” Plummer said.However, other taxpayers, like 31 year-old Aquiel Warner in Austin, Texas, say they want to avoid using commercial tax preparation software.Warner filed her taxes with Direct File in 10 minutes using her phone and a chatbot that the IRS provides. She likes the program’s convenience, that it prepopulated her tax forms and that it allowed for free filing. Although she has some concerns about data privacy in the governmentDOGE is reported to have access to some of the IRS’s internal systemsshe feels more secure going through the IRS than commercial tax preparation services.“I don’t want to be a product. I don’t want my information sold when I file my taxes,” she said. “I have to file my taxes, and I don’t want to be put in a situation where, in order to file my taxes, I have to pay to get the help I need because I’m not a professional tax preparer.”Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said the IRS never got explicit permission from Congress to create the Direct File system.“It really doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea. It was done illegally,” he said, calling on Congress and the Justice Department to look into what he says is unauthorized spending that went into the creation of Direct File.Democratic lawmakers in January asked Bessent and IRS commissioner nominee Billy Long to preserve the program. They wrote in a letter that “ending Direct File would hurt everyday Americans.” Long has not yet received a nomination hearing.In the meantime, Musk and his cadre of computer programmers could decide to wield their tech skills to boost the programor use the very same digital savvy to delete it.For his part, Werfel hopes that the agency will keep the program. “It’s a big country with a lot of taxpayers with a lot of different preferences,” he said.Francis, the Boston barista, hopes so, too.“There are a lot of young people like me who are working and figuring out how to file their taxes this just makes it faster and easier,” she said. Fatima Hussein, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
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