Layoffs at Education Dept. Leave Scars Behind the Scenes

Exactly one year has passed since Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced a historic reduction in force, laying off nearly half of her department’s staff and declaring it a “significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.”

Despite predictions that the Education Department wouldn’t be able to carry out many of its statutory responsibilities after losing more than 2,000 employees, the agency remains standing—at least from a public perspective.

Union officials, policy experts and some current staff members, on the other hand, say that several of the agency’s key operations have been rendered significantly, or in some cases entirely, dysfunctional.

“The machine is just broken in ways that we can’t see,” said Antoinette Flores, director of higher education accountability and quality at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “You won’t know that something has gone wrong until it’s too late.”

Not all of the layoffs have stuck. Late last year, the Education Department rescinded the layoffs in the Office for Civil Rights. ED has also started to hire dozens of employees on short-term contracts to work on legal services and in the Office of Federal Student Aid, according to court filings, job postings and contract documents. But since the primary lawsuit challenging the RIF, New York v. McMahon, and its respective preliminary injunction were struck down by the Supreme Court, it will be nearly impossible to reverse the RIF entirely.

From a backlog of civil rights complaints to inquiries about grant programs that have been delayed or gone unanswered, America’s agency of education oversight is running on empty, experts say. And while these hindrances may not be directly hurting college students en masse—as forward-facing services like the Free Application for Federal Student Aid are running smoothly—institutions have reported disruptions to communication and processing timelines as well as kinks in the National Student Loan Data System and disruptions with loan servicing.

“Financial aid officers’ and school administrators’ jobs got harder as their processes take longer and they get less responsiveness and support,” one current department official told Inside Higher Ed on condition of anonymity. “That may not matter to the public, but I think it’s one way in which things are harder.”

The Department of Education, however, continues to cast the layoffs as a win, drawing attention to its successful forward-facing projects rather than delays occurring behind the scenes.

“Thanks to bold reforms by the Trump Administration, ED is a more efficient and accountable agency than we were a year ago,” department spokesperson Ellen Keast said in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “We strengthened fraud prevention efforts, launched the earliest FAFSA form in history, and are on pace to implement the largest overhaul in higher education in decades via President Trump’s Working Families Tax Cuts Act.”

(The department declined to answer more specific questions about how many former staff members in total have been reinstated, how many new ones have been hired and the behind-the-scenes issues such as delays in program approval and compliance reviews.)

‘They Want Their Jobs Back’

Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents ED workers, said that beyond just the institution-level impacts, it’s also important to remember how these layoffs have affected hundreds of staff members and their families. Many remain unemployed a year later, she said.

“The federal government is a really niche work environment. There’s a lot of government processes that are really hard to parlay into other fields. That’s part of, honestly, why there’s so much longevity in the federal government,” Gittleman explained. “But beyond that, people genuinely wanted to stay. They want their jobs back.”

Those who did find other work say they had to take a pay cut, leave D.C. or switch industries. And while the final court decisions are likely a long way off, the union is actively using an ongoing process called arbitration to try address its grievances and seek recourse.

Denise Joseph, a former management and program analyst at ED, was among the first to receive a pink slip. Joseph said that while she was able to support herself with the income from severance, a personal tutoring company and a graduate assistantship in her Ph.D. program over the last year, she is still on the lookout for full-time work. But the job hunt can be “daunting” while managing a part-time teaching role, she added.

She hopes the mass layoffs help spur Americans to fight to prevent future reductions in force.

“The RIF was done illegally. It was done without due process,” she said. But now, “we can see that we have these vulnerabilities with our federal workforce. We have to do things to really protect the federal workforce, because it protects the fabric of our country.”

Issues Unseen ‘by Nature’

Flores and the current department official say they are worried about some of the behind-the-scenes work at the Office of Federal Student Aid.

FSA, the department’s largest office, saw the deepest initial cuts. At least 300 staff members were fired, and at least five of the 10 regional offices were shuttered, while others were merged. About 60 FSA staff members were reinstated shortly after the March RIF to address malfunctions in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness portal and other “mission-critical” mechanisms, according to the union. But many holes still remained, specifically related to the FSA regional offices, which work directly with colleges and universities to approve and oversee their eligibility for all federal student aid.

As a result, Flores said, new programs are having a hard time getting off the ground and existing ones are not being checked to ensure they are following the rules. The department hasn’t updated its list of school fine reports or enforcement actions since the RIF, and its heightened cash monitoring web page hasn’t seen a change since June, she added.

The department official added that with more than 5,000 colleges disbursing more than $120 billion in federal aid per year, such a significant reduction in oversight is bound to increase the likelihood of malfeasance.

“Those are cases the public will not see by nature of the fact that they are not caught,” the official said. “So there’s no smoking gun at the end of that, but there are a lot of bodies.”

Another area of concern is whether ED has the capacity needed to implement the sweeping overhaul of loans, grants and accountability measures outlined in Congress’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Unlike the behind-the-scenes operations, experts believe this could be an area where the public could more clearly see the consequences of the RIF.

According to the department official, ED has already hired more than 100 new FSA staff members on two-year contracts to help address this concern. And while an ED spokesperson did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for confirmation, multiple OBBBA-related roles at ED were still listed on the USAJobs website as of Tuesday. The Washington Post has reported that hiring is up across the executive branch.

In a similar vein, the department acknowledged through court filings in January that it would hire up to 450 contract attorneys to help address a backlog in borrower-defense cases. Government spending documents from February show the department signed two contracts totaling $14.8 million with two different legal groups for “the delivery of attorney services adjudication work to the Department of Education.”

Still, Flores and other higher ed policy experts wonder if this additional staffing will be enough and worry that borrowers could be left in the lurch.

For instance, as certain income-driven loan repayment programs end, students will have a limited window of time to change payment plans, and she fears that borrowers will face processing delays and won’t be able to get ahold of staff members at ED if they have questions.

“The department has eliminated some of its capacity at staffing call centers that would provide guidance. It’s instead relying on an AI assistant,” Flores said.

The department official said the agency is cognizant that fewer staff members means a lower overall capacity and certain projects will have to be prioritized. But from the union’s perspective, there wasn’t much room to trim the department in the first place, and the workload placed on remaining staff members is unfeasible.

On top of the layoffs, McMahon is outsourcing dozens of grant programs to other federal agencies as part of a series of interagency agreements, which is causing more confusion for the employees who remain.

“To say that these folks are overworked and riddled with uncertainty is an understatement,” Gittleman said. “So if the early parts of the harms are staggering, it’s terrifying to look down this year and think about what’s coming next.”