In his first two months back at the White House, President Donald Trump has railed against rampant “waste, fraud and abuse” across the government.
That criticism, based in many cases on false and misleading claims about federal workers and programs, has fueled sweeping cuts. Another dramatic round of layoffs came last week when Trump staffers announced they’d slashed the workforce in half at the U.S. Department of Education.
Linda McMahon, the newly installed education secretary, said Tuesday the cuts will eliminate “bureaucratic bloat.” Experts predict they’ll significantly impact students and teachers nationwide.
“Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most,” McMahon said in a statement last week.
Gutting the agency may actually have the opposite effect, according to laid-off workers and former high-ranking officials. In interviews and social media posts, they argued that firing the watchdogs whose job is to hold schools accountable will hurt students who need help the most, while opening the door to predatory behavior.
“If there is waste, fraud and abuse, this administration has now eliminated the very agency that would provide oversight for that,” said attorney Sheria Smith, one of the hundreds of employees fired from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights on Tuesday.
Last week offered a troubling glimpse into what critics view as the potential fallout. The Federal Student Aid office, which disburses federal student loans and Pell Grants, lost over 300 people to layoffs, a preliminary union tally shows (that estimate doesn’t include nonunion members or supervisors). Student loan experts, technology specialists and people who investigate colleges were dismissed.
The day after the losses, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, experienced a massive outage. The Education Department said the glitch wasn’t related to the cuts.
In addition, the office that tracks student progress and administers funding for studies about the effectiveness of federal education programs was eliminated “wholesale,” Smith said.
Trump officials have promised those key offices can still fulfill their functions, which are mandated by Congress. Yet it’s unclear to employees and concerned observers how that will be possible. Democratic state attorneys general and disability rights advocates have sued, saying the cuts breach the limits of the executive branch under federal law.
As schools enter a new era with less oversight, the implications for students may be hard to monitor, said Brittany Coleman, a Dallas-based civil rights attorney who was laid off.
“We’re now about to be on the honor system,” she said.
As the Education Department’s workload has grown, Congress hasn’t meaningfully increased its budget, prompting longstanding concerns about understaffing. For that reason, officials at the agency often turn to outside contractors to carry out much of their work.
That reliance can create problems. Last year offered a prime example: A series of issues with the FAFSA prompted massive delays in the enrollment process for both colleges and students.
Under former President Joe Biden, the Federal Student Aid office, which oversees the FAFSA, was reorganized. The goal was, in part, to help make the form function more smoothly. And the revisions worked, Miguel Cardona, Biden’s education secretary, told USA TODAY in January. The FAFSA got back on track.
Last week, the newly reformed office was gutted. James Kvaal, Biden’s top higher education official, was alarmed to learn important divisions had been reduced to skeleton staffs or scrapped, jeopardizing the entire federal financial aid system.
“All of our efforts to ensure those kinds of mistakes are not made again have been reversed,” he said.
“These issues could continue to happen,” said Edward James, a laid-off Federal Student Aid staffer who is vice president of the local union representing Education Department workers.
His colleagues, he said, were “the glue that helps hold things together.”
The Education Department plays a significant role in ensuring that schools are deterred from taking advantage of students or discriminating against them. Fulfilling those dual missions will be tough with fewer personnel, employees said.
On Tuesday, one key office that regulates colleges dropped from 192 staffers to 29 in minutes, a laid-off employee posted on social media. Kevin Roberts, an institutional review specialist dismissed last week, called it a “guaranteed fact” that some colleges will be forced to close or lose eligibility for federal financial aid because of the downsizing.
“Linda McMahon has basically given 4,000 institutions plus foreign schools the green light to waste, abuse, and create fraud with Federal Financial Aid dollars with zero oversight,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
The Office for Civil Rights, a vital watchdog for abuse, shuttered seven regional offices across the country, from New York City to San Francisco. It’s a huge deal, said Catherine Lhamon, who led civil rights enforcement in schools in the Biden administration.
Those regional offices exist, she said, so that attorneys can develop relationships with school lawyers, administrators and communities. The on-the-ground support ultimately speeds up investigations, solving students’ problems more quickly.
“The department has so gutted the offices that they’re a sham now,” she said.
Three days after Trump officials fired hundreds of staffers in the civil rights division, the Education Department ordered sweeping new investigations of six colleges accused of offering “impermissible race-based scholarships.”
The new cases represent a “dangerous” reorientation of the office Lhamon led for years, she said. In her view, its sole focus now seems to be “pet projects for political leadership.”
Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.
