More than 600 positions have been eliminated from the Federal Student Aid office, internal documents show. Now, in many places, “no one is identifying schools that are failing financially.”
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has made it a top priority to dismantle and reorganize the federal Education Department. Simultaneously, he has promised time and again to keep the programs that millions of students and schools rely on untouched.
But internal agency documents, court filings and interviews with college officials show that the scale of massive staffing cuts to the agency’s most important offices has already disrupted many of those systems.
Take the Federal Student Aid office, which helps millions of people pay for college. Federal student loans, Pell Grants and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, depend on the experts who work – or used to work – there.
Organization charts obtained by USA TODAY indicate the department has fired hundreds of people at FSA, including entire teams, in recent weeks.
Roughly a tenth of the small group overseeing the FAFSA rollout has also taken buyouts or retired. In the wake of a massive FAFSA outage, which happened shortly after the Education Department said it was cutting its staff in half, dozens of technology experts were quietly rehired, according to the charts, court documents and former agency officials. The agency has said the outage was unrelated to staff turnover.
In a statement to USA TODAY last week, Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said: “No employees working on the FAFSA or student loan servicing were impacted” by Trump’s layoffs.
Experts disagree. Staffers in the Technology Operations Division – a unit initially eliminated through layoffs – are vital to fixing issues with the FAFSA, said Melanie Muenzer, a former Education Department official who helped lead higher education policy during the Biden administration.
“Anybody who has worked on the FAFSA will tell you that these people are critical to that effort,” she said.
Colleen Campbell, who recently resigned as executive director of the Office of Loan Portfolio Management, stated in court documents this week that the agency knew it screwed up.
“The staff who were responsible for overseeing the complex network of technology infrastructure used by FSA and FSA vendors were gone,” Campbell said in a written declaration. “When leadership realized this was a problem, they started to reinstate some, but not all, of the staff.”
Campbell’s warnings about the next few months for students and borrowers were dire.
“I expect we will see issues wherein these complex, intertwined technology systems cannot be adequately managed because so many of the people experienced in identifying and resolving incidents will have left,” they said. “This puts critical functions, like the FAFSA, aid disbursement, and loan repayment at risk.”
Two other offices also experienced similar mass terminations among personnel, followed by a partial restoration of staff.
The cuts at FSA run deep: Employees who monitor colleges’ finances and try to safeguard students during unexpected school closures have left or been laid off. Many of the people who keep colleges compliant with rules they must follow to dole out financial aid are gone. Others whose jobs were to hold student loan servicers accountable were eliminated, too.
Chris Miller, who ran the Atlanta branch of one of FSA’s college oversight divisions, said in court filings this week that his office already had a backlog of more than 800 financial reviews before the layoffs. It’s unclear when and where that oversight – which ultimately helps protect students from predatory colleges or ones struggling financially – might resume.
“Our work ensures that schools are financially sound and responsible, which is correlated to the quality of the education they provide,” he wrote. “No one is identifying schools that are failing financially.”
Beyond the massive layoffs, the charts reveal the extent to which many divisions of FSA, including those in charge of the FAFSA and student loans, have been impacted by the Trump administration’s broader efforts to dramatically shrink the federal workforce.
Roughly 200 people in FSA took early retirement offers or buyouts. In total, more than 600 staffers have left since Trump took office, according to the charts. That’s about half the workforce FSA employed in fiscal year 2024.
“They’ve clearly moved to a hollow-out strategy,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, during a webinar last week with college leaders from around the country. “There are going to be massive, massive disruptions in service.”
Trump’s promise that funding for student loans and Pell Grants won’t be affected by the Education Department’s downsizing “seems incongruent with a 50% cut in staff,” said Karen McCarthy, the vice president of public policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
If the administration has figured out a way to protect students from being impacted by all the upheaval, it would be helpful to share it, she said.
“If they have a plan for the redistribution of work and how everything will be carried out within FSA,” she said, “we encourage them to release that publicly.”
Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.
Ramon Padilla is an award-winning visual journalist for USA TODAY.
