On March 3rd, when Linda McMahon was sworn in to lead the Department of Education, she lauded its “momentous” and “historic final mission”: self-destruction. About a week later, she notified employees of a large-scale “reduction in force.” (President Donald Trump had instructed her to “do a great job and put yourself out of a job.”) Politico published an org chart that tracked the scope of the firings. Across seventeen pages, many divisions and subdivisions were shaded blood-red.
The Office of Civil Rights was slashed; hardly anyone is left to enforce anti-discrimination laws on behalf of students and parents in K-12 public schools. The Institute of Education Sciences went from nearly two hundred employees to about twenty, a worker told me; the move endangers a century and a half of data and research. The Office of English Language Acquisition, which provides grants to help students whose first language isn’t English, was completely wiped out. The entire Department of Education had only forty-one hundred employees to begin with, making it the smallest Cabinet-level agency by head count. (I gathered from interviews that it is a predominantly female workforce, which tracks with the demographics of K-12 school employees.) McMahon’s reduction in force brought that number to just under twenty-two hundred, she wrote in a press release. And further cuts are expected.
Rachel Gittleman’s corner of Ed, as the department is called, was not marked in red, but it might as well have been. Since 2023, she had worked in Federal Student Aid, an office that is, in effect, one of the largest banks in the world, with a portfolio of some $1.6 trillion. “I loved working with borrowers, helping to make this incredibly complicated and convoluted system easier for people,” she told me from her home in Seattle. Gittleman was one of many F.S.A. workers, based all over the country, who were fired in March. They were allowed to return to their offices last week, for a maximum of thirty minutes, to pick up their belongings and return their government-issued laptops. A vastly diminished staff is now responsible for making loans and grants to some ten million students who attend vocational schools, community colleges, and universities every year. In conjunction with private loan servicers such as MOHELA and Aidvantage, which have contracts to administer and collect on monies owed, the F.S.A. supervises repayment for thirteen per cent of the U.S. population, or about forty-three million people.
Ed carries out this business because of Title IV of the Higher Education Act, a law signed by President Lyndon Johnson, in 1965, which was meant to expand access to college. In the past six decades, as tuition at public colleges went from free to costly—and, at private universities, from costly to exorbitant—federal-student-loan amounts grew larger. (The average balance is around thirty-eight thousand dollars; more than ninety-two per cent of total student-loan debt originates from the federal government.) Loans also grew more varied and complex, with income-based repayment plans, forgiveness options, and protections against defaults and fraud. The F.S.A. oversees every step of the lending process, from application (the FAFSA form that so many high-school seniors procrastinate filling out) to disbursement, repayment, and discharge. It must respond to all the problems that come up along the way: servicers billing the wrong amounts; identity theft; improper denials of certain forms of loan forgiveness, such as when a borrower takes a job in public service; harassment by debt collectors. In fiscal year 2024, nearly three hundred thousand students and borrowers submitted complaints, more than double the previous year.
Gittleman, who is in her early thirties, worked in the Ombudsman Group, the watchdog of the F.S.A. She was a professional untangler of knots. “I loved to help people become debt-free,” she told me. In college, she had taken out federal student loans, which she paid back while working as a congressional aide. Later, she did outreach for a consumer-rights nonprofit, and “started to understand the debt burden in this country,” she told me. “For so many of the borrowers we work with, student loans are seen as a necessary debt in order to have a successful future.”
In the ombudsman’s office, Gittleman made thousands of calls and sent many more e-mails to resolve the hardest cases—for borrowers who’d reached out through the feedback system multiple times. Last year, she handled four hundred such matters. There were borrowers who’d had to declare bankruptcy, borrowers with a “total and permanent disability.” She and her team once troubleshot the loans owed by an American who had been taken hostage abroad. The stress of indebtedness was such that, even during the hostage’s detention, “they had reached out because they were concerned about their student loans,” Gittleman told me.
The complaints, submitted mostly online, at StudentAid.gov, were often desperate:
Like many employees of Ed and the F.S.A., Gittleman had her critiques of the system. “A society should not be forcing people into an untenable financial situation in order to get ahead,” she said. The Ombudsman Group was necessary because loan servicers, and Ed itself, got things wrong, and because for-profit institutions sometimes misled their students. (Ed recently settled a class-action lawsuit alleging that the department failed to discharge debts for more than half a million students who were defrauded by their schools.) In a better world, Gittleman said, there would be “free or affordable community college and vocational programs, or greater funding to public universities.” In the real world, just last month Ed told the loan servicers contracted by the F.S.A. to freeze applications for income-driven repayment plans, which peg monthly amounts to household earnings and promise eventual forgiveness—leaving only the most expensive repayment options. (The applications were reopened last week, in response to a lawsuit.)
On March 20th, Trump signed an executive order calling for the complete “closure” of Ed. (Elon Musk tweeted a crudely Photoshopped meme of Trump posing in front of a tomb labelled “Departmen of Education.”) The order specifically addressed the functions of the F.S.A. “The Federal student aid program is roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo,” it said. “But although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid.” To DOGE, this could almost come off as a compliment. Gittleman did not see it that way. “We have a lot of operational requirements and subject-matter expertise that a traditional bank doesn’t,” she told me.
The following day, Trump announced that the F.S.A. would be relocated to the Small Business Administration, which manages around four hundred and sixty billion dollars in mostly private loans. (Moving the F.S.A. and closing Ed would require acts of Congress; meanwhile, the S.B.A., which McMahon ran during the first Trump Administration, is being cut in half.) The experts I spoke with inside and outside Ed believe that the goal is to fully privatize student loans. “What they’re trying to do is build a new market for Wall Street,” Mike Pierce, of the Student Borrower Protection Center, told me.
Reporting on the F.S.A. has brought back memories of my own student-debt story. My parents didn’t have much experience with the higher-ed system, or much money. They did know the names of standardized tests and fancy schools, and pushed me toward them. Don’t worry about the cost, they said. We filled out the FAFSA. I took out federal student loans. My parents took out Parent PLUS loans, at a high rate of interest. Then my younger brother went to college. Again: FAFSA, student loans, Parent PLUS loans. After college, I deferred payment while I lived abroad and then went to law school—paid for again with borrowed money, this time from private banks. The interest mounted. At some point, I consolidated my student loans, which exceeded two hundred thousand dollars. It took ten years, and a generous public-service repayment plan, to zero out the balance.
The cost of collecting on a debt can be greater than the amount owed. Private debt collectors buy debt in bulk, for cents on the dollar, knowing that they’ll lose out on a certain percentage of the total. Ed has used a similar logic to determine which loans simply aren’t worth pursuing. During the pandemic, the first Trump Administration paused all repayments, and the Biden Administration made fixes to public-service loan forgiveness and expanded options for income-driven repayment. More than five million borrowers had loans forgiven. Republican attorneys general sued to stop some of these reforms, and won. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 recommended the abandonment of income-driven repayment and loan forgiveness, and an embrace of private lending: the S.B.A. model. In a separate paper, the plan’s education expert blamed “massive and unnecessary education subsidies” for the drop in America’s fertility rate.
Criticism of the student-loan system isn’t confined to the right. A debtors’ movement that grew out of Occupy Wall Street has pushed for free public college. Better to spend up front, in covered tuition, than on loans that often don’t get repaid. But consumer advocates who have criticized, even sued, Ed for violating borrowers’ rights are now filing lawsuits to save the agency. In one such case, Tammy Sabens, a sixty-four-year-old Kentuckian with more than fifty-one thousand dollars in outstanding educational debt (double her principal), attested to the “anxiety” and “panic attacks” caused by her inability to apply for income-driven repayment.
In another case, a university administrator explained the cascading effects of “current reductions in staff at F.S.A.” The acting Under-Secretary of Education had promised that “no employees working on core functions” of FAFSA or student-loan servicing had been affected by the reduction in force. But the FAFSA portal was clearly glitchy. As a result, students did not know which grants and loans they qualified for “until well past notification of their acceptance” to colleges. Poor students were missing out on opportunities, and schools were having to push back their deadlines.
Here’s what Gittleman said in her declaration to a federal court:
“I’ll be doing something at home, and a case will pop up in my head,” Gittleman told me last week. “I had dozens of borrowers who were trying to get on income-driven repayment programs. I’d been working on one case for two years.” She was proud of having helped a public librarian who’d had to declare bankruptcy “become debt-free.” She had received a family Christmas card from a borrower with a debilitating illness. It’s unclear what will happen to the three-hundred-plus complaints that Gittleman had been working on. “I never got to transition my cases,” she told me. “My e-mail was actually shut off before I got fired.” ♦
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An earlier version of this article misstated when Gittleman was fired.
