Current and former staffers, financial aid officers and previous education secretaries are doubtful the office that helps students pay for college won’t be disrupted by mass layoffs and resignations.
Is this the end of the Department of Education?
Recent moves by the Trump administration effectively signal his fulfillment of a campaign promise to end ED.
WASHINGTON – Last week the Trump administration announced it was slashing the federal Education Department’s workforce in half. This week the president signed an executive order declaring he was dismantling the agency “once and for all.”
In the interim, people he pushed out the door were quietly rehired.
An internal organizational chart obtained by USA TODAY shows roughly three dozen technology experts were reinstated after being laid off from the Federal Student Aid office, the marquee division of the agency that helps millions of students pay for college and oversees nearly $2 trillion in federal student loans.
The hushed rehiring comes as the White House vows the department still has sufficient resources to help students afford degrees and pay off their loans.
But a lot of people aren’t buying that promise.
Included among the skeptics are current and former staffers at FSA, previous education secretaries and financial aid officers at colleges across the country.
Already, college officials say they have a backlog of logistical questions building up now that fired federal workers have stopped returning their emails.
Brenda Hicks, the financial aid director at Southwestern College, a private school in Kansas, said an employee at FSA who was helping greenlight a new nursing program at her institution was let go last Tuesday. The program was started, Hicks said, so that young people in her rural community wouldn’t have to drive an hour out of town to become nurses.
She’s not panicking yet. But she’s unsure who will approve financial aid for the new major. And the clock is ticking: Students are already being admitted to the nursing program.
“I have a buddy up the road in the same situation,” she said. “We’re both kind of commiserating.”
FAFSA outage follows layoffs
It didn’t take long for scrutiny over the layoffs to intensify. The day after the Education Department announced staffing cuts last week, students nationwide briefly couldn’t apply for financial aid.
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, a form used by millions of students, went offline due to a technological glitch.
The Education Department said the error was unrelated to the layoffs announced just hours earlier. “No employees working on the FAFSA or student loan servicing were impacted by the reduction in force,” spokesperson Madi Biedermann said in a statement.
But getting the wheels to turn and keep rolling on big government projects like the FAFSA requires workers with a range of skills. Inevitably, problems come up. When they do, students and parents need someone to call and web pages to consult. So do colleges.
Many of the experts who helped navigate those issues are now gone. IT professionals were dismissed, as were workers who oversaw vendors and others who approved financial aid for new college majors.
Without them, students have already begun to experience disruptions, said Sarah Sattelmeyer, a financial aid expert who was detailed to the Education Department during the Biden administration to help fix problems with the FAFSA.
After Trump’s cuts, “really serious and immediate impacts” are coming for student loan borrowers, college students and anyone reliant on the federal financial aid system, she said.
“They talk about it as though they’re cutting fat, but there’s not a lot of fat there,” she said, referring to the Trump administration’s rationale for the firings. “The cuts are actually hitting bone.”
Technology divisions swiftly reinstated
Dozens of staffers in FSA’s technology services and operations divisions were rehired after the Trump administration fired them last week, according to an internal organization chart.
Separately, the chart also shows that employees who oversee the FAFSA were affected by the Trump administration’s broader workforce reduction efforts, even if they weren’t laid off.
Four staffers in the Office of Student Aid Program Management, which has the primary role of managing the FAFSA’s rollout, said yes to recent buyouts and early retirement offers. Those departures have reduced the division by roughly 10%.
Federal Student Aid office loses hundreds of employees
More than 320 employees in the Federal Student Aid office received termination notices last Tuesday, according to a preliminary tally from a union representing federal workers.
The Education Department declined to provide a breakdown of personnel laid off from the Federal Student Aid office. FSA had 1,444 employees in 2024, according to the office’s annual report.
The reduction last Tuesday came after 124 employees across FSA took buyout offers from Elon Musk’s government efficiency team, according to an internal list obtained by USA TODAY. Based on the latest available numbers, the buyouts and layoffs cut the workforce of the entire division by at least a third (though that proportion is likely higher due to other types of recent departures).
It won’t take long for student loan borrowers to start feeling the effects of such massive losses, said Mike Pierce, the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.
“There is not the brainpower or the muscle in place to be able to run this entire financial institution,” he said.
Last Friday, James Bergeron, the acting under secretary at the Education Department, sent a letter to colleges attempting to allay their worries about the layoffs. No employees working on “core functions” of the FAFSA or student loan servicing were impacted, he assured them.
“These reductions are strategic cuts to offices and programs that will not directly impact students and families but rather empower states and localities,” he wrote.
Alyssa Dobson, the director of financial aid and scholarships at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, was one of thousands of college officials who received the letter. It gave her pause.
“I just can’t fathom how we won’t see delays,” she said.
Financial aid officers are already seeing issues
In Conway, South Carolina, Samantha Hicks, was at a workshop for new financial aid professionals last Tuesday when she learned about the Education Department layoffs.
“There’s always something,” she cautioned the group. “Change is our new normal.”
Many parents and students at Coastal Carolina University, where she is the assistant vice president of financial aid, have been calling her office in past weeks, worried about how the turmoil at the Education Department might impact them.
Though she’s doing her best to comfort those families, she expects they could feel some pain eventually.
“Any loss of that scale has to affect something, right?” she said.
Former education secretaries warn of predatory colleges
Some of the onlookers most concerned about the Education Department’s future are its former leaders.
In interviews with USA TODAY, three former education secretaries who served Republican and Democratic presidents expressed dismay about last week’s cuts at the Federal Student Aid office and the department more broadly.
Any slight hiccup in delivering financial aid to students can be the difference between students going to college or not, said Margaret Spellings, the former education secretary under President George W. Bush.
“If they can’t get through the process, they’re gone for good,” she said.
With less oversight, there could be an uptick in predatory colleges using federal dollars to rip students off, said John King, who served as education secretary under former President Barack Obama from 2016 to 2017.
Arne Duncan, who filled the same position for Obama before King from 2009 to 2016, echoed that sentiment.
“Basically, you’re just going to see a lot of people get hurt,” he said.
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.
