FSA Staff Now Slated to Move to Treasury Office

The Office of Federal Student Aid and some of its staff are scheduled to begin vacating their current space in the Department of Education’s Lyndon B. Johnson Building on Friday. But rather than move into the old USAID building, as the Trump administration originally announced in March, FSA will now transfer to a Department of Treasury building on Washington’s symbolic K Street, according to an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed.

Other offices within ED are still expected to move to the former USAID building, though the dates of their transfer have not been announced and legislation approving the move still needs the Senate to sign off. 

The FSA staff who have been instructed to move out this week won’t settle into the Treasury building, along with staff from the Internal Revenue Service, until Aug. 17. Until then, they are expected to work remotely—a practice the second Trump administration has largely opposed. A second wave of staff will arrive at K Street on Sept. 8, but it’s unclear when they will leave LBJ and whether they will spend any time working remotely. 

The decision to move FSA to K Street, which ED did not publicly announce but has confirmed to Inside Higher Ed, reflects Trump’s broader goal of dismantling the Department of Education. It comes about four months after his administration signed an interagency agreement transferring the office’s oversight of defaulted student loans to Treasury.

The shift is taking place during one of the busiest times for both FSA staff and college financial aid advisers—the start of a new academic year. 

Ellen Keast, the department’s press secretary for higher education, noted that FSA has worked in a different building than the rest of the department before and that the arrangement shouldn’t cause any disruption of service. 

“They will continue to produce high-quality work regardless of where they sit in the DMV area,” she said. The move brings “our teams closer to Treasury partners and enables tighter coordination across key operational work streams. This consolidation is an important step in scaling down unnecessary layers of federal education bureaucracy and delivering faster, more streamlined services to the millions of students, parents, borrowers and schools who rely on federal student aid.”