A key office in the Department of Education responsible for fielding grievances about student loans has a backlog of more than 27,000 complaints after losing nearly two-thirds of its staff.
The department revealed the pileup in a July 21 letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., according to a copy provided to NBC News. The Federal Student Aid ombudsman office receives hundreds of complaints a week, related to problems with student loan processing, repayments and financial aid scams.
The office closed just over 1,100 complaints in May, the most recent month with available data, and Warren wrote in a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Wednesday that this pace made her concerned that the backlog will continue to grow.
“The Trump administration is abandoning Americans who have been scammed by their student loan servicers or have problems with their loans,” Warren said in a statement to NBC News. “I’m pushing Secretary McMahon because families across this country deserve answers about her efforts to dismantle the Department of Education.”
The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Donald Trump has vowed to close the Department of Education, a move that requires congressional approval, and McMahon has said she views her role as part of a mission to wind down the agency’s operations. The Trump administration enacted mass layoffs at the department this year, cutting nearly 1,400 employees, which the conservative majority of the Supreme Court permitted last month.
Warren’s letter to McMahon this week included dozens of questions about how the department is handling its core functions in light of the layoffs, requesting information about income-driven student loan repayment plans, debt relief, student loan servicer contractors and a backlog of civil rights complaints. She asked for a response by Aug. 20.
“The American people deserve to know how your policies are impacting services and programs that millions of students and families across the country rely upon,” Warren wrote.
The ombudsman office receives student loan complaints from borrowers, vendors and members of Congress who refer messages from constituents. According to a court filing from a former manager in the office, there were 16,000 backlogged complaints when the Trump administration began widespread layoffs in the department in mid-March. The ombudsman office has dropped from 63 staff members to 25 this year, according to a separate sworn declaration by the same former department employee. And as of late June, the backlog of student loan complaints had grown by about 11,000.
“I am zero percent surprised,” said Jessica Thompson, senior vice president of The Institute for College Access & Success, which advocates for students to be able to attend college without taking on excessive debt. “I expect this to exponentially grow, even more than the past couple of months. They don’t have nearly enough capacity to make headway on complaints.”
Complaints to the Federal Student Aid ombudsman office skyrocketed during the Biden administration, annual reports show, as the department ended a yearslong pause in student debt payments instituted during the Covid pandemic and the Supreme Court knocked down loan forgiveness programs.
A delay in addressing complaints means borrowers aren’t getting timely answers to common issues, such as trouble receiving disbursements, problems with payments being counted, or being overcharged, Thompson said. And stretched-thin staff at the ombudsman office also may have less time to identify trends or common issues, she added.
The Trump administration has made other changes to the student loan program, including resuming collecting defaulted student loan debt. In reversing Biden-era programs that emphasized debt forgiveness, the administration aims to focus on efficiency, Sarah Ursprung, the top official for the Department of Education’s interactions with Congress, wrote in the July 21 letter to Warren.
“Moving forward, we must establish accountability measures throughout the student aid process and simultaneously eliminate excess bureaucracy and spending to instead focus on delivering programs authorized in statute in a streamlined fashion,” she wrote.
The pileup of complaints to the ombudsman office is separate from a backlog of 1.5 million people seeking to enter income-driven repayment plans for their federal loans, which cap monthly bills at a low percentage of their wages. In Warren’s letter Wednesday, she criticized McMahon as being “extraordinarily vague” in describing how the department will work with loan servicers to move through these applications quickly.
The sheer number of borrowers struggling to repay their loans in a shaky labor market means it’s a challenging time for the Department of Education to be short-staffed, Thompson said.
“Unfortunately right now, you are seeing a peak moment in the history of the loan program where you need an ombudsman office,” she said.
