Trump Gutted the Education Department, Then Quietly Went on a Hiring Spree To Rebuild It

Less than 14 months after the Trump administration declared the Education Department’s workforce reduction its “final mission,” the same office it gutted most aggressively is now racing to hire hundreds of people back.The Federal Student Aid office, known as the FSA, is targeting approximately 380 new full-time employees, a figure that has grown since an internal all-staff presentation in April set the target at 334 additional hires — on top of 731 full-time staff, itself roughly half of FSA’s pre-2025 headcount — with 52 of those positions already filled since September.It is a remarkable about-face for an administration that spent more than a year portraying the agency’s career workforce as bloated, unnecessary, and fundamentally incompatible with its vision for American education.What the figures lay bare is a plan that ran hard into reality. Before the March 2025 layoffs, the FSA had approximately 1,440 staff members. Of the nearly 970 unionized employees swept up by the government-wide reduction in force, 326 were at the Federal Student Aid office alone.The cuts fell on people who oversaw the federal student loan portfolio, managed Free Application for Federal Student Aid processing, and monitored the private companies that service hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt. Within days, consequences were visible: the Free Application for Federal Student Aid website experienced a nationwide outage.The slashing had eliminated the entire team responsible for systems supporting the form, according to a person with knowledge of the outage. However, the department attributed the disruption to a contractor issue.“The decision to increase staff so soon after widespread reductions raises legitimate questions about the planning behind the original cuts,” National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators president and CEO Melanie Storey tells The New York Sun.“The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators has consistently maintained that the Federal Student Aid office requires robust staffing to carry out its mission effectively, and we would welcome any increases in staffing, particularly in technical and customer service roles, to support students and institutions.”So, was this a plan that always had a phase two, or a demolition job that went further than anyone intended?The demolition That Wasn’tWhen Education Secretary Linda McMahon gathered agency staff to announce the mass layoffs in March 2025, she framed the moment in sweeping terms, calling it the department’s “final mission” and invoking a “commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.”President Trump had long promised to abolish the department entirely and return education authority to the states. The reduction in force, which eliminated roughly half the agency’s workforce in a single day, was presented as the opening act of that transformation.In total, the department lost around half its total workforce: approximately 1,400 employees received layoff notices, another 600 retired or accepted voluntary separation incentives, and roughly 100 probationary employees were fired.According to data from the Office of Personnel Management, the department went from roughly 4,200 employees in 2024 to approximately 2,300 by 2026. More than 100 programs and obligations were simultaneously offloaded onto other federal agencies, including elementary and secondary education programs shifted to the Department of Labor and family engagement efforts moved to the Department of Health and Human Services.Even as FSA rebuilds, the administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request, submitted in April, proposes cutting roughly 500 additional positions elsewhere in the department, concentrated in Program Administration, the Office for Civil Rights, and Student Aid Administration. The Office for Civil Rights alone would shrink from 530 full-time staff to 271 under the proposal. Congress, however, has so far resisted those cuts: lawmakers fully funded the Office for Civil Rights at $140 million in February, rejecting the administration’s proposed $49 million reduction.The handoffs have continued since. The Associated Press reported June 16 that the Justice Department will take over the Education Department’s civil rights enforcement, with the Department of Health and Human Services assuming responsibility for special education oversight, even as the FSA hiring push continues in parallel.Yet abolishing a department and running one are two different things. The Federal Student Aid office oversees statutory obligations — the federal student loan portfolio, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, oversight of servicers and institutions — that affect tens of millions of Americans and do not disappear when employees do.“There are three leading interpretations of this move,” research fellow Andrew Gillen at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom tells the Sun. “One, the 2026 staff cuts went too far, and now the administration is scrambling to rebuild. Two, the cuts worked as intended, using the reduction in force to clear out deadweight and hostile staff, with rehiring always part of the plan.”The third, from Mr. Gillen’s point of view, is that “significant changes to financial aid, including implementing student loan repayment, a wave of defaults, and new payment plans, created staffing needs that weren’t apparent when the cuts were made.”Mr. Gillen also underscores that the third explanation is underestimated in a debate that has broken largely along partisan lines.“Democrats lean toward the first theory, while Republicans lean toward the second,” he explains. “Personally, I think the third theory explains more of what’s going on than it gets credit for, but that whole debate is almost entirely about politics, with little impact on those outside DC.”Put simply: the answer may have less to do with ideology than with the unglamorous reality of running a system that oversees $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans and disburses roughly $120 billion in aid each year.Chaos, Court Fights, and Rescinded NoticesThe months following the initial reduction in force were defined by legal battles and operational dysfunction that undercut the administration’s claims of a strategic restructuring. Inside Higher Ed spoke with more than a dozen former and current department staffers who described the process as “disorganized and unstrategic,” saying the cuts had led to technical failures, gaps in oversight, and the large-scale loss of institutional knowledge.Certified public accountants with specialized knowledge of Title IV regulations, the complex rules governing federal student aid eligibility, were among those pushed out, leaving the department struggling to meet congressionally mandated responsibilities.A second round of cuts in the fall compounded the damage. During the government shutdown in October last year, the Education Department issued reduction-in-force notices to 466 employees, gutting the Office of Special Education Programs and drawing condemnation from disability-rights advocates, lawmakers, and parents of children with disabilities nationwide.A federal judge blocked those layoffs, and the government reopened in November under a continuing resolution that reinstated the affected employees and barred further reductions through January 30, 2026. The administration rescinded the remaining notices in early January without explanation.A federal judge who reviewed the earlier reductions said they were “explicitly intended for political retribution and have been rolled out haphazardly, with no evidence of reasoned decision-making.” A separate GAO watchdog report found the department spent up to $38 million paying Office for Civil Rights staff who were sidelined during the March 2025 reduction in force and barred from working while court injunctions were litigated, with no documented analysis showing the cuts had achieved their stated efficiency goals. Survey data offers a window into how the cuts have played out in practice.In the most recent National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators survey — conducted in July 2025, the latest publicly available data at time of writing — 72 percent of over 500 financial aid administrators reported noticeable disruptions to Federal Student Aid responsiveness or processing timelines since the March reduction, up from 59 percent in May.More than half reported that students were receiving confusing or delayed information from the department, and 60 percent reported an increase in student inquiries about Federal Student Aid services.Rebuilding what was burned downThe April presentation to Federal Student Aid staff laying out the 334-hire target arrived weeks before Secretary McMahon faced her most pointed congressional scrutiny yet — appearing before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on April 28 and then the House Committee on Education and Workforce on May 14 to defend the administration’s fiscal 2027 budget and its overall approach to the department.The hearings were combative. Virginia Representative Bobby Scott, the ranking Democrat on the House panel, told Ms. McMahon in his opening remarks: “The Trump administration has not ‘returned education to the states.’ Rather, he has empowered you to effectively dismantle one of our country’s strongest civil rights institutions.” Ms. McMahon sparred with lawmakers over student loan caps, civil rights enforcement, and the future of special education oversight — offering no firm answers on where key programs would ultimately land.The appearances produced one striking concession. Ms. McMahon, who a year earlier had called the mass layoffs a “momentous final mission” and vowed to eliminate “bureaucratic bloat,” acknowledged to senators that the department had gone too far in some of its cuts and that certain matters had been handled in an “inadequate” way.On staffing numbers, Ms. McMahon described her budget figures as a starting point, telling senators the proposed level was “a floor number” and that she was hopeful the department would “have the ability to increase” it with congressional support.For its part, the department has pointed to what it calls concrete progress. Ms. McMahon told lawmakers the Free Application for Federal Student Aid is “proceeding as it should” and that the office is making “great strides” in its programming. The department also announced in December that enhanced fraud controls had prevented more than $1 billion in federal student aid fraud since January 2025 — a figure the administration has continued to cite. However, some financial aid administrators have questioned the underlyingmethodology.The Department of Education did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment.The question of whether new hires can fill the gap left by the departures is one that some critics do not sidestep.“Rebuilding is possible, but it takes time,” Ms. Storey adds. “The technical and regulatory expertise required to administer and oversee the integrity of billions of dollars in federal student aid is not acquired quickly. We hope the administration will invest not just in headcount but in training, retention, and the institutional infrastructure needed to restore full capacity.”

Trump Gutted the Education Department, Then Quietly Went on a Hiring Spree To Rebuild It

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