While being dismantled, Education Department hunts for workers : NPR

President Donald Trump’s plans to close the U.S. Department of Education have run up against a tricky reality: The agency is doing important work that still needs to be done.

After losing about half its staff during last year’s sharp downsizing, the department’s student loan office is in the midst of a hiring boom. The Federal Student Aid Agency (FSA) is adding about 380 new workers, according to internal documents obtained by NPR.

The FSA is the central nervous system of the nation’s $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio. It handles everything from communications with the nation’s 43 million borrowers to repayment plans to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

In April, FSA held an internal all-staff meeting in which employees were informed that FSA has 731 full-time equivalents (FTEs) — about half the staff it had before the current Trump administration (1,440) — and that it “needs to hire an additional 334 FTEs to meet our goal.” That’s according to documents obtained by NPR and prepared for this meeting.

The documents also show that FSA has already hired 52 new workers since September.

“What these job postings confirm is what we’ve known all along: Our jobs matter,” says Rachel Gittleman, a former FSA employee who is now president of AFGE Local 252, which represents the department’s employees. “And [our jobs] are necessary for our federal student loan system to work properly for borrowers.

When asked to explain the hire in light of last year’s mass layoffs, Ellen Keast, the department’s press secretary for higher education, responded: “Returning education to the states and dismantling the federal education bureaucracy does not mean essential programs won’t continue.”

News of the FSA hire was first reported by Politico.

Keast says none of these new FSA hires are former employees returning to their old jobs.

Still, Gittleman says, the jobs themselves haven’t changed much.

“All of the jobs that we have seen offers for since September of last year can be attributed to a job that has ended or, in some scenarios, to a job that has been the subject of a deferred resignation or retirement program,” says Gittleman.

It is unclear what the cost of recruiting, hiring and training these new employees will be.

The FSA certainly has a lot of work to do: implementing new limits on student loans as well as two new repayment plans. This is in addition to important work that has been left behind. An investigation by the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that just before last year’s budget cuts, the FSA stopped verifying the accuracy of loan servicers’ records and borrowers’ call recordings.

In a public appearance last year, Education Secretary Linda McMahon acknowledged that in some areas her agency’s overall downsizing had gone too far: “You always just want to trim the fat.” … Sometimes you cut into the muscle and you cut a little too deep. And we brought some people back. Not much, but we found that we had cut a little deep. »

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is another example. There, significant budget cuts were made, blocked by the courts and ultimately overturned as OCR struggled to process civil rights complaints.

According to a separate GAO investigation, this unnecessary back-and-forth at OCR ended up costing taxpayers between $28.5 million and $38 million.

Aren’t student loans transferred to the Treasury Department?

This hiring spree at the Department of Education comes as McMahon trumpeted 10 new interagency agreements intended to shift the department’s work to other federal agencies, including shifting responsibilities from the FSA to the Treasury Department.

In a March letter explaining the need for the Department of Education to partner with Treasury, McMahon wrote: “For too long, Americans have borne the consequences of poor leadership and persistent mismanagement of our federal student aid portfolio. Today’s actions demand integrity and accountability for you, the American people. »

But this hiring suggests that it will still be Department of Education employees doing the Department of Education’s work. In his statement to NPR, Keast said as much – that the agreement with Treasury allows “FSA to continue to manage and improve the implementation of these programs.”

This confusion over who does what came to light during a recent Senate hearing, when McMahon told lawmakers that in the case of a deal with the Department of Labor, “these are the same people from the Department of Education that are at the Department of Labor. … These are the same people that you knew at the Department of Education that are located elsewhere.”

McMahon’s comments disconcerted Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat.

“You’re sending Department of Education employees to work in other agencies to administer the same programs from different buildings,” Baldwin said in disbelief.

NPR spoke with another former FSA staffer who was fired last year. They didn’t want to be identified because they are in the process of applying for one of these new jobs that, they say, is a lot like the one they had until last year’s massive downsizing.

“We just want our jobs. We took an oath to serve the public, and that’s what we want to do.“

The former FSA staffer noted a difference in the application process this time:

There is a new set of questions about a candidate’s commitment to the Constitution, improving government efficiency and a question that has already sparked a lawsuit: “How would you help advance the President’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role?” »

“I feel like they want you to show loyalty to this administration,” the former staffer says.

Edited by: Nirvi Shah
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson