Shane Holloway

In December 2023, I detailed to Department of Education to aid delivery of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). For background, the FAFSA Simplification Act and FUTURE Act mandated substantive changes to the Federal Student Aid program. In March 2022, FSA awarded a contract for this, along with platform migration from mainframe to the AWS cloud. However, the system did not launch by the October 1st, 2023 deadline, and the USDS team was brought in to facilitate accepting of FAFSA applications no later than December 31st, 2023.

The USDS team split essential remaining work into prioritized deliverables: accept FAFSA submissions, process applications, send records to institutions, accept corrections from students, fund origination & disbursement, bug fixes & reprocessings, etc. In my engineering role, I facilitated integration of AWS Distro for OpenTelementry, built a suite of CloudWatch dashboards, and actively monitored system operations for the first two weeks. We delivered the first milestone on New Years Eve, hours before the statutory deadline. To validate the FAFSA Processing System over the following months, I built reference implementations of the SAI & Pell Guide, ISIR format parser and validator, and FPS business rules from Volume 5-8. Following an IRS integration mismatch, I built the FAFSA UUID Search tool to assist institutions in identifying affected student records.

On March 26th, I accepted the USDS team lead role backed by 9 exceptional Digital Service Experts from disciplines of Design, Engineering, Product Management, and Acquisitions. In the lead role, I met frequently with 10+ executive stakeholders, including the White House Deputy Chief of Staff from the Executive Office of the President (EOP), Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Department of Education (Ed), and Federal Student Aid (FSA). Continuing our momentum in April and May, we delivered record reprocessing, student correction capabilities, and deep dives into field reported issues. By the end of the year, the 2024-25 FAFSA aided over 7 million students.

In May and June, we reoriented to prepare for the 2025-26 FAFSA delivery, bringing on a team co-lead, 12 new USDS experts, and welcoming the FAFSA Executive Advisor team. From July through September, we facilitated forking FAFSA into parallel systems, validated changed logic, and delivered ahead of the October 1st target. In October and November, we executed 4 graduated Betas to validate the correct operation of the split FPS system with 122,340 applications and a 95% satisfaction rate. FSA was able to confidently open the 2025-26 FAFSA to the public 10 days ahead of schedule, serving millions of students. In parallel, we established FSA's Digital Service by hiring 8 experts from Design, Engineering, and Product Management disciplines.

Returning to USDS, I joined the team at Social Security Administration (SSA) for six months on mission to collect customer experience data from SSA's extensive data warehouse. Along with my data science teammate, we combed through 15,000 tables and 230,000 columns to create a live dashboard in Tableau. The dashboard aggregates customer journey threads across visits to field offices, calls to the 800 number, and online interactions with the SSA.gov website. This discovery sprint culminated in delivery of the dashboard, written recommendations, and a presentation to Acting SSA Commissioner Kijakazi. Leveraging this momentum, the USDS team at SSA improved 800-number customer service and thereby reduced customer hold times.

In August, I helped the USDS team at Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) in DOJ. Joining mid-sprint, we delivered integration REST APIs for coordination with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of DHS to alleviate manual data entry effort and errors between federal agencies. By eliminating opportunities for error, we improved data accuracy while also improving integration velocity. We followed with a 6 week discovery sprint to meet court clerks and judges, identifying further opportunities to reduce immigration case durations.

In December, I detailed to the FAFSA USDS team. (see above)

I had the privilege of serving the American people on a 6 month tour. As an engineer on a multi-disciplined team of designers, engineers, product, and procurement experts, we dove deep into the Unemployment Insurance service experiences across our 50 states and 3 territories. Our discovery sprint focused on uncovering and advising where application of modern design and technology could result in better service delivery to the American people while at the same time addressing identity theft related to Unemployment Insurance fraud. The sprint culminated in a report and briefing to the National Economic Council and Gene Sperling as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

After this 6-month tour, I resumed with ScribeRule (Encipher).