The first two years of the Obama administration brought nothing but good news for student financial aid programs. These included increases to grants, tax benefits, and funding for community colleges and minority-serving schools. But in early 2011, President Obama and Congress released the new budget with a request that would achieve large savings within the Pell Grant program by eliminating a little-discussed provision that allowed students to receive an additional Pell Grant for attending school beyond the typical two-semester schedule (typically-called year-round Pell Grant). Why? Many in the higher education community--including authoritative sources from Congress, the Obama administration, and the Congressional Research Service--will say it was because the program was flawed. Up until now, no one has examined those claims. To find out what actually happened, the history of the year-round Pell Grant was carefully reviewed: the statute and regulations that implemented it, budget statistics, and the rationales given for its elimination. Also interviewed were experts inside and outside the executive branch and Congress. What was found was not gross incompetence, abuse, or ill-designed policy that many believed plagued the original program. This paper scrutinizes common claims such as: students inadvertently received larger grants than intended; a year-round benefit shouldn't increase the cost of the overall Pell Grant program; for-profit colleges abused the program; and the Department of Education botched the implementation of the program, driving costs higher. Ultimately, this paper shows that the year-round program was buffeted by the same forces that caused every other part of the Pell Grant program to rise in cost, and that those forces coincided with decisions Congress had made that exacerbated funding problems with the overall Pell Grant program. Ending year-round grants became an expedient way to trim costs without sacrificing more visible parts of the broader Pell Grant program. The paper includes recommendations for a New Year-Round Pell Grant program. An appendix: 'Year-Round Pell Grant, Statutory Language under the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, Public Law 110-315" is included. [The New America Education Policy Program's work is made possible through generous grants from the Alliance for Early Success; the Annie E. Casey Foundation; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the Grable Foundation; the Foundation for Child Development; the Joyce Foundation; the Kresge Foundation; Lumina Foundation; the Pritzker Children's Initiative; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; and the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation.]