Dismantling of Education Department puts future of trillions of dollars in student loans in question

(CNN) — As President Donald Trump prepares to order the dismantling of the Department of Education, the financial arm of the agency – which makes loans directly to borrowers and manages trillions of dollars in student debt – faces an uncertain future, with steep staff cuts and lack of communication exacerbating the uncertainty, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former department employees.

The $1.64 trillion financial portfolio is managed separately from the department’s policy apparatus, the latter of which Trump has sought to wind down or reassign to other agencies. But Trump acknowledged Thursday that the massive loan balance was a complicating factor in his effort to shutter the agency.

“We’ve actually had that discussion today,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, suggesting that the debt could land at Treasury, Commerce, or the Small Business Administration. He said SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler “would really like to do it.”

And then there is the question of whether the government will stay in the business of lending money to students directly.

Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation effort that was authored by many Trump allies, though Trump tried to distance himself from it during last year’s campaign – suggested a new agency should be established to extend loans going forward, run by a Senate-confirmed leader and board of trustees. But the government would get out of the business of making the loans directly, instead reverting back to a role as guarantor of loans underwritten by other companies. The new agency would be funded by Congress, with a goal of “treating taxpayers like investors,” with loans that could have better terms for certain academic disciplines or professions.

“Easy access to federal student loans and grants … does not give students the incentive, necessarily, to make sure they are pursuing careers or degrees that will lead to careers with a solid return on investment,” Lindsey Burke, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy and author of the corresponding Project 2025 chapter, told CNN in an interview.

In Project 2025’s vision, old loans should be moved to the Treasury Department, which would manage defaults and collections.

How Treasury would manage the portfolio is unclear. Roughly 40% of the loans are currently delinquent, or behind in payment, according to people familiar with the data; after 90 days, the missed payments are reported on a borrower’s credit report, and after 270 days without payment, the loan officially goes into default.

Experts warn that an avalanche of new defaults could be approaching as borrowers come to terms with the end of a multi-year pause on loan payments and changes to more affordable payment programs.

“It’s a tidal wave coming for an unprepared village,” said one former senior Education Department employee who departed recently. “The fallout is not even hypothetical now.”

To try to keep borrowers current on their loans and avoid slipping off these financial cliffs, the Education Department employed contractors to ramp up communication and offer other payment options. The drafting and dissemination of those pre-default e-mails, current and former Education employees told CNN, were done by Accenture, an outside company whose contract DOGE has eyed canceling.

“The people who would write those e-mails have been fired, and the more affordable [repayment] plans are going away,” said the former employee. “It’s almost like the government doesn’t even want to get paid.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Shrinking options available to borrowers

The cancellation of payment programs based off a borrower’s income – after months of legal challenges – has added uncertainty for borrowers facing weeks of strained staffing and customer service backlogs at the Department.

In 2023, the Biden administration introduced a series of more affordable payment plans known as “SAVE” that allowed borrowers to cap their monthly student loan bills at 5 percent of their income, instead of the previous 10 percent. Republican state attorneys general sued, arguing the plans were too generous and footed by non-college-educated taxpayers.

As it moves to comply with a judge’s order to end the SAVE plan, the Education Department has removed applications for all income-driven repayment plans from its website, effectively locking out borrowers from adjusting their plans if they’re unable to pay the standard rate.

During nearly three years as an analyst at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Nicolas Salem paid $250 each month to pay down the $25,000 in debt he accrued to graduate from Tufts University. When he and his entire division were laid off from the CFPB, his income fell to $0 overnight.

But with no options to adjust his payments – and no luck reaching his loan servicer, Mohela, after more than 17 combined hours on hold – he’s grappling with how to handle the hardship.

“I think I’m going to have to move,” Salem told CNN in an interview, calling the payments an “extreme drain” on the money he had saved.

On Thursday, officials at the Office of Federal Student Aid held a meeting to explore whether certain income-based repayment plans could be reinstated on the website if they weren’t completely covered by the injunction. The outcome, said one of the meeting’s participants, now rests with the agency’s newly installed lawyers.

The income-based repayment plans that survive are expected to be more costly for borrowers.

“We’ve been told ‘SAVE’ is not coming back in any way, shape, or form,” one FSA staffer told CNN.

Strained ranks, lack of communication

Colleges and universities are expected to share information with admitted students about qualifying aid packages in a matter of weeks, shortly after April 1 admissions deadlines.

But Education employees told CNN that the agency hasn’t been able to provide any communication to schools, servicers, or borrowers about how to navigate the changes that are coming. And many staffers with institutionalized knowledge about the aid programs have been fired or left.

Education Department employees, like those at other federal agencies, received Elon Musk-inspired “fork in the road” emails in January saying they could stop working and still get paid if they resign as of September 30. Then this past weekend, the department offered certain employees buyouts of up to $25,000.

Between those two efforts, roughly a quarter of the Student Aid division’s 1,500 employees are departing, according to employees briefed on the numbers.

Now, the department is preparing for steep layoffs that are expected to target a majority of remaining employees.

“If [Trump] says, ‘We’re going to have a 50% reduction in staff,’ there is reason to be concerned about how the system will work: Is that enough people?” says Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute. “We’re going to learn whether or not they can do the job with fewer of them.”

The cuts would mean FSA must serve the same roles with a fraction of the personnel and outside contractors who performed critical functions.

“I’m afraid of what the coming days, weeks, months, years will bring not just for me and the Department, but for the borrowers we serve,” Colleen Campbell, FSA’s Executive Director of Loan Portfolio Management, wrote in a public post on LinkedIn. Campbell said she and her dwindling staff are working in an “impossible environment.”

The Department faced backlash in 2024 when a revamp of the student aid application form – the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA – underwent a facelift. The botched rollout created confusion for applicants and, in some cases, delayed aid disbursements for months.

Several staffers from the US Digital Service were detailed to the Education Department in 2024 to assist in the process. Those employees, according to sources in the agency, were among the 21 USDS staffers who resigned in protest over employees from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort trying to gain access to sensitive data.

Experts say the FAFSA rollout is a cautionary tale to what could lay ahead.

“We already saw the impact of not getting enough appropriated money to manage the FAFSA process,” says Michele Shepard Zampini, senior director at the Institute for College Access and Success. “Now having so many career staff gone … it’s cause for concern.”

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Michele Shepard Zampini’s name.

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