The Education Department is hiring — while it's being dismantled

Education The Education Department is hiring — while it's being dismantled May 21, 20265:00 AM ET Cory Turner LA Johnson/NPR President Donald Trump's plans to close the U.S. Department of Education have run headlong into an awkward reality: The agency does important work that still needs doing. After losing roughly half its staff in last year's big reduction-in-force, the department's student loan office is in a hiring boom. The Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) is adding around 380 new workers, according to internal documents obtained by NPR. Education U.S. Education Department says it is cutting nearly half of all staff FSA is the central nervous system of the nation's $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio. It manages 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 told that FSA has 731 full-time equivalent staff (FTEs) — roughly half the staff it had prior to the current Trump administration (1,440) — and that it "needs to hire an additional 334 FTEs to meet our target." That's according to the documents NPR obtained, which were prepared for this meeting. Sponsor Message The documents also show 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 staffer who is now president of AFGE Local 252, which represents department employees. "And [our jobs] are needed in order for our federal student loan system to function adequately for borrowers." When asked to explain the hiring in light of last year's mass firings, Ellen Keast, the department's press secretary for higher education, responded: "Returning education to the states and breaking up the federal education bureaucracy does not mean that critical programs won't continue." News of the hiring at FSA was first reported by Politi...