The Education Department stopped key student borrower protections : NPR

A little more than a year ago, the U.S. Department of Education abandoned essential oversight of the companies that manage the federal student loan program, according to a new report from the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

GAO investigators found that as of February 2025, the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) stopped reviewing loan servicers’ records for accuracy. The FSA has also stopped reviewing recordings of calls with borrowers to ensure they are receiving accurate information.

Without this monitoring, the report warns, borrowers could suffer the consequences.

“If servicer records are inaccurate, borrowers could, for example, be placed in poor loan repayment status, charged incorrect amounts, or not have their repayment processed on time,” the report states. “Similarly, the FSA has no longer monitored calls since February 2025, so there is a risk that borrowers have received or will receive incorrect information and poor customer service.”

The investigation was requested by ranking members of the House and Senate education committees, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

“Instead of providing relief to 43 million Americans who are drowning in student debt,” Sanders said in a statement to NPR, “the Trump administration has made it harder for them to understand how much they owe and how long it will take them to pay it back.”

What the administration has to say about the GAO findings

The Federal Student Aid Office is supposed to conduct quarterly reviews, according to its contracts with loan servicers.

These reviews include comparing loan servicers’ borrower records with the FSA’s own records, to detect gaps or discrepancies, as well as “targeted reviews” of borrowers in specific situations, including those requesting temporary relief from their payments.

Assessments that have been paused are more labor intensive than other types of automated monitoring, according to the GAO. According to the report, agency officials told the government watchdog that they stopped these reviews in early 2025 “due to lack of capacity among FSA staff.” This is around the same time that the Trump administration began significantly reducing staffing levels at the Department of Education.

According to the report, FSA began 2025 with 1,433 employees; in December there were 777, a reduction of 46%.

In a written response accompanying the report, Richard Lucas, FSA’s acting chief operating officer, disagreed with GAO’s recommendation that FSA resume the exams. While confirming that the FSA had indeed ended the monitoring in question, Lucas wrote: “The FSA has determined that a better approach is to provide substantive oversight through additional activities that measure the accuracy of service providers’ data and the quality of their performance. » These activities include regular reviews of borrower satisfaction surveys.

Melissa Emrey-Arras, who led the GAO study, says the FSA’s “best approach” is not better.

“While reviewing these satisfaction surveys can be helpful, they do not directly assess the quality of information provided to borrowers. A borrower may indicate that they were satisfied with a call, without realizing that their servicer gave them completely false information,” she says.

The FSA’s latest review found problems with loan servicers’ accuracy.

Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, which represents servicers working on the federal student loan program, says servicers also police themselves.

“[Servicers] internally, we monitor far more than any of our regulators could or ever would. Because it is in our interest to ensure that these errors are corrected. And because we have contracts, and if we have major problems that become clearly apparent, then people will say, “We’ll find someone else to do it.”

In late 2024, before the Trump administration ended oversight, GAO’s review of service officers’ recordkeeping found that “four of five service officers failed to meet performance standards for accuracy and faced associated financial penalties.”

In fact, the record keeping of two service providers was complicated enough to merit the maximum financial penalty allowed.

And the GAO notes that the Department of Education’s independent financial auditor reported as recently as January 2026 that the department “continued to have a material weakness related to the reliability of its student loan data.”

Additionally, Emrey-Arras says, reduced oversight within the FSA has also meant a reduction in efforts to hold providers financially accountable for their performance. This responsibility, she says, “is essential. Without it, the government risks paying too much for poor performance.”

For borrowers, servicer mistakes can lead to very real problems, Scott said in a statement to NPR. “Borrowers can either pay too much or be placed in the wrong student loan repayment program. [The Education Department’s] refusing to exercise oversight over student loan servicers constitutes a dereliction of duty.

Reduced monitoring of significant student loan changes

These staffing and oversight reductions come as millions of federal borrowers will need help transitioning to new repayment plans. The Biden-era SAVE plan is in turmoil, with borrowers now being charged interest and the plan set to close no later than 2028. Twelve million more borrowers are in default or on track to default.

Additionally, in July, a series of potentially difficult new changes to the student loan program will begin — thanks to Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act — including the introduction of two new repayment plans and the phasing out of others.

The GAO warns that these changes will affect millions of borrowers who “will need accurate and complete information when they call for help.” Yet at this time, the Department of Education cannot be certain that this is actually what borrowers are getting.