Education Department Launches Hiring Spree In Key Office After 2025's Mass Layoffs

The Trump administration has launched a hiring blitz at the agency it vowed to eliminate, according to an internal presentation reviewed by POLITICO.

The Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office saw some of the most significant staffing cuts at the agency last March during the administration’s government-wide reduction in force. Now, that same office is trying to hire 334 full-time employees by 2027 — a 45 percent increase from its staffing levels as of last month — according to the presentation delivered to FSA staff in mid-April.

The office manages some of the agency's largest and most well-known programs that affect millions of Americans, including the student loan portfolio and college financial aid forms while also overseeing the companies that service student debt and schools that receive federal student aid.

So far, the student aid office has onboarded 52 new employees between September 2025 and March 2026. But even if FSA reaches its goal of having a total of 1,065 full-time employees, that's still well under the 1,568 during the previous administration.

The growth at the student aid office is coming at a surprising time. Not only are top agency officials touting their dismantling of the department, but the agency also partnered with the Treasury Department to begin moving its $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio, a significant focus of the office’s work, to the fiscal agency.

That said, last year’s mass layoffs also came as Congress vastly expanded the agency’s workload and responsibilities. The student aid office was tasked with launching two new repayment plans, implementing a grant for short-term programs and sunsetting some loan programs rolled back in Republicans’ sweeping domestic policy law.

The office also is considering thousands of applications for student loan forgiveness for borrowers who were defrauded by their colleges, as required by a 2022 court settlement.

“I’m glad they’re recognizing that they need additional help and that they went too far. It underscores how reckless and irresponsible the original decision to lay off half the staff was,” said James Kvaal, who was Education undersecretary during the Biden administration. “I hope as they’re bringing people back, they are being more careful and thoughtful of getting the right people to meet their needs than they were when they were laying people off.”

The Trump administration cannot shutter the Education Department — one of the president’s campaign promises — without congressional approval. But it has spent months offloading many of the agency’s programs elsewhere across the federal government, arrangements that still require Education staff to help oversee them.

“As the Secretary has said countless times, returning education to the states and breaking up the federal education bureaucracy does not mean that critical programs won’t continue,” Education Department spokesperson Ellen Keast said in a statement. “We signed a partnership with Treasury for FSA to continue managing and improving delivery of these programs.”

She also said none of the new hires were employees who were terminated in the March 2025 reduction in force.

The White House referred a request for comment to the Education Department.

The presentation did not make clear exactly what the new hires will be doing, but the top three positions being filled are technology specialists, program analysts and attorney advisers.

Some of the hiring is intended to boost a unit that deals with making sure schools comply with Title IV, the law that governs federal student aid programs, investigates accusations of fraud and conducts routine probes of all student aid recipients.

There will also be hires made in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer and in another office that deals with higher education program management.

Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, the union that represents Education Department employees, said the latest round of hiring shows the mass layoffs didn’t make the department any more efficient.

“All of this is an insult to the nearly 43 million Americans with federal student loan debt and to the taxpayers who depend on federal oversight to prevent waste, fraud and abuse,” Gittleman said in a statement. “These new job posts are more proof that last year’s mass firing at the Education Department was never about efficiency or saving taxpayer dollars.”