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.
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).
