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.

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 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 postings for since September of last year can be traced to a job that was terminated or, in a certain few scenarios, a job that was subject to a deferred resignation or retirement program,” Gittleman says.

It’s unclear what the cost will be to recruit, hire and train these new employees.

FSA certainly has a lot to juggle: rolling out new limits on student loans plus two new repayment plans. That’s on top of important work that’s fallen by the wayside. An investigation from the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that, right before last year’s cuts, FSA stopped reviewing the accuracy of loan servicers’ records and recordings of borrower calls.

In a public appearance last year, Education Secretary Linda McMahon acknowledged that, in some areas, the overall reduction-in-force at her agency had gone too far: “You always just want to cut fat. … Sometimes you cut into the muscle and you cut a little too deep. And we’ve brought some people back. Not a lot, but we did find that we cut a little bit deep.”

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is another example. There, deep cuts were made, stalled by the courts and eventually reversed as OCR struggled to process civil rights complaints.

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

Aren’t student loans moving to the Treasury Department?

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

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

But this hiring suggests it will still be Education Department employees doing the work of the Education Department. In her statement to NPR, Keast said as much — that the agreement with Treasury is for “FSA to continue managing and improving delivery of these programs.”

This confusion over who’s doing what came up in a recent Senate hearing, when McMahon told lawmakers that, in the case of an agreement with the Labor Department, “it is the same people from the Department of Education that are at the Department of Labor. … It’s dealing with the same people that you’ve known at the Department of Education that are located somewhere else.”

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

“You are sending Department of Education employees to work at other agencies to administer the same programs from different buildings,” Baldwin said, incredulous.

NPR spoke with another former FSA staffer who was laid-off last year. They did not want to be identified because they are in the process of applying for one of these new jobs that, they say, closely resembles the job they were doing until last year’s broad reduction-in-force.

“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 one difference with the application process this time:

There is a new series of questions about an applicant’s commitment to the Constitution, improving government efficiency and one question that has already triggered a lawsuit: “How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?”

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

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