On Tuesday, the Trump administration fired nearly half of the Education Department’s roughly 4,100 employees, leaving the agency with a skeletal staff of about 2,183. Now, a day later, the scope and impact of those layoffs are beginning to take shape.

The nation’s largest education research agency went from roughly 100 employees to about five, according to a laid-off employee, crippling the government’s capacity to inform education policy. The Office of Federal Student Aid lost hundreds of career staffers, undermining oversight of student loan practices, the maintenance of the federal financial aid system and the authorization of new programs. And the Office for Civil Rights, which fields thousands of student and educator complaints about discrimination and harassment each year, is now down to just five regional offices.

The department hasn’t detailed how the layoffs were distributed across the agency, which is one of the smallest in the president’s cabinet. But a spreadsheet from the union representing department employees containing 969 names along with interviews with formers staffers offer insights into how the reductions shook out.

Across the board, former department officials, policy analysts, equity advocates and legal experts worry that the reduction in force will be a blow to crucial services for students and institutions. The Education Department oversees colleges and sends them billions of dollars each year in student loans, Pell Grants and other federal support.

James Kvaal, under secretary of education during the Biden administration, said the cuts will undermine the department’s ability to carry out congressionally mandated responsibilities, leaving students and colleges in the dark.

“These are the people who make sure federal dollars are spent according to the rules and as effectively as possible,” he said. “Eliminating that capacity is not going to reduce government waste; it’s going to create more confusion.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the cuts were necessary to ensure efficiency and return power to the states, and conservative policy experts say the reductions could be beneficial in the long run.

“We don’t know how many people are actually needed to execute [the department’s] jobs, and it’s time to find out if it’s been a bloated bureaucracy all along,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

McMahon has stated repeatedly that the cuts will not affect statutorily required programs like Pell Grants and funding for special needs students. But Beth Maglione, interim president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, is not convinced that’s possible.

“Claiming that eliminating half the department won’t affect its services—without any clear plan to redistribute the workload—is, at best, naïve and, at worst, deliberately misleading,” she said in a statement Wednesday morning, adding that there has been little explanation about where the department will go from here.

One department employee who was not affected by the cuts told Inside Higher Ed that in a meeting with remaining education staff Wednesday, a Trump appointee called the RIF “very strategic”—a claim that the employee said was greeted with indignation from current staffers.

To Kvaal, the cuts were “arbitrary and rushed.”

“I think it would be a mistake to assign any rational decision-making here,” he said. “It wasn’t like [the administration] reviewed the staff and coincidentally 50 percent of them were expendable. They had an arbitrary target delivered from the top down, and they were tasked with hitting it.”

FAFSA and Student Loans

Of the nearly 970 unionized employees affected by the RIF, 326 were at the Office of Federal Student Aid, according to the union list. FSA is in charge of managing the federal aid system, including assistance programs for borrowers and oversight of unscrupulous lenders.

Sarah Sattelmeyer, a project director at the left-leaning think tank New America, worked for FSA from February of last year until just before Trump’s inauguration. She said the personnel cuts across the department—but specifically at FSA, which has long struggled with staffing issues—are “devastating.”

“The staff and programs that were cut will be those that touched the lives of every student and borrower in the country,” she said. “The department, and FSA in particular, plays a critical role in protecting students and overseeing the higher ed sector. Those roles are thoroughly weakened.”

Before the layoffs, FSA had about 1,400 staff members.

The cuts could have dire short-term consequences, especially for maintaining the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which was recently overhauled and had just begun to recover from a disastrous launch plagued by technical glitches and system errors, experts and staffers said.

A current Education Department employee who spoke with Inside Higher Ed anonymously said the cuts at FSA were particularly severe among technological support staff, and the loss of capacity could hamstring the FAFSA’s functionality.

“FSA lost entire divisions within the technology office, including product management and technology operations,” they said. “There’s now no one here to oversee the system that ingests IRS data or the entire data center that hosts the FAFSA. The team is scrambling to assign other people, but the expertise isn’t immediately replaceable.”

The cuts also decimated some of the support infrastructure that helped students, families and college financial aid staff navigate the complicated student aid and loan systems. Call center support, the ombudsman office’s community support division and the support services division for institutes of higher education were all gutted by the cuts.

Sattelmeyer said those teams are crucial to the administration of the office’s core duties.

“For anything that’s a statutorily mandated function, it’s equally important to have all the services that wrap around it,” she said. “You need call centers. You need effective servicing. You need online resources for parents. You need assistance for borrowers when they are struggling. You need someone who can help walk university staff through regulations that are always evolving … when you cut them, every program is going to face consequences.”

Regional Offices Shuttered

One group of staff members within the department that received some of the most significant cuts, multiple sources said, was the team that handles higher ed oversight and enforcement.

Otherwise known as the School Participation Division, the group relied heavily on ten regional offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle. But on Tuesday, all but two—Chicago and Philadelphia—were essentially obliterated. Some of the offices including Denver and Chicago were clumped together and led by the same manager, however, it is unclear whether any staff remain at the Denver office. (This paragraph was updated to correct the number of regional offices and which offices remain.)

The group has historically managed colleges’ eligibility for federal grants, provided regulatory support to individual institutions, investigated fraud, evaluated new programs and approved mergers, among other responsibilities.

Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations at NASFAA, told Inside Higher Ed she expects the cuts to lead to confusion, chaos and major authorization delays for colleges and universities across the country.

Aaron Lacey, co-chair of the higher education practice group at Thompson Coburn LLP, said he expects the Trump administration will simply transfer many of the same responsibilities to a now-smaller group of people. Like McCarthy, he said that for now, that will mean a backlogged to-do list.

“How could it not?” he said. “This is a significant disruption.”

But over time, Lacey hopes the authorization and investigation processes will be scaled back, which would reduce the responsibilities to match the size of the smaller workforce.

For example, merging colleges, which originally took 60 to 90 days and required just four or five attachment files, could take as long as two to three years and require dozens of additional documents under changes made by the Biden administration. Lacey hopes that within a year the Trump administration can push things back to the way they were before.

But those and other changes will take time.

“I imagine two big things happening at the department simultaneously—a reduction in staff and a reduction in scope of responsibility,” Lacey said. “The big question mark is, how long will it take this administration to reduce the scope of responsibility, and will there come a point when it is reduced sufficiently that it can be managed by the remaining staff?”

But others, including Antoinette Flores, another New America employee who formerly worked for the Biden administration, worry losing staff at the regional offices will simply eliminate consumer protection measures and hurt students.

“The regional teams focus on institutional compliance [and] investigate fraud, waste and abuse. They investigate student complaints and ensure that schools are following the law,” Flores said. “One of the primary impacts will be an increase in students being misled, ripped off and not getting value from the education that they’re enrolling in.”

A Blow to Data Collection

The Institute of Education Sciences shed hundreds of staff responsible for tracking students’ educational outcomes and generally providing the research backbone for education policy, from the local to the national level. On Tuesday, 100 of its employees were laid off so that only about 20 remain, according to two sources within the agency.

IES houses the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects reams of data about colleges and universities and administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a key K-12 standardized test. The NCES was founded in 1867, predating the Education Department by more than 100 years.

One NCES employee affected by the RIF, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed anonymously, said they had thought the agency might be shielded from the worst of the layoffs.

“We felt we’d be more protected because of our history and because the work we do really isn’t political,” said the staffer, who’d been with the statistics agency for more than 15 years.

The former staffer said that NCES was left with “closer to five than 10” employees and wouldn’t be able to meaningfully continue the agency’s work. They’re worried that the research and analysis in their wheelhouse won’t find a home outside of the dilapidated department.

“I think the idea is to give this back to the states, but they don’t have the resources … if you take our already-limited capacity away, who fills the void? Think tanks? Companies?” the staffer said. “Is there any sort of plan at all?”

OCR Hollowed Out

Another hard-hit agency was the Office for Civil Rights, which is tasked with protecting students from discrimination. Policy experts said the office could struggle to fulfill its mandate following the cuts.

“It’s hard to just overstate how much is being lost in these cuts,” Flores from New America said. “It means that complaints that are submitted are not going to be adequately investigated if at all these issues are just going to go unaddressed.”

At least 243 of the division’s about 550 staff members were let go Tuesday, union data shows. And while complaints were historically filed and investigated via a dozen regional outposts across the country, only five will remain, in Atlanta; Denver; Kansas City, Mo.; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.

“What you’ve got left is a shell that can’t function,” former assistant secretary for civil rights Catherine Lhamon told ProPublica.

The office has received more and more complaints in recent years, most of which relate to either sex- or disability-based discrimination. The Biden administration pleaded with Congress for more staff at OCR to handle investigations, which are key to how the office has historically operated. The office received 22,687 complaints in fiscal year 2024 and had more than 6,000 open investigations in January.

To the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a long-standing civil rights advocacy group, the cuts represent a “disregard” for higher education and an instance of “ideological hostility” toward the federal government’s role as the great opportunity equalizer. “We always say in policymaking, if there’s no data, there’s no problem, and if there’s no problem, there’s no solution,” Patrice Willoughby, NAACP’s chief of policy and legislative affairs, told Inside Higher Ed.

The downstream consequence will be increased institutional racism and a lack of recourse for students of color, Willoughby said. “Students that are in a hostile environment are less likely to attend and to stay, because why would they?”

The OCR cuts are particularly baffling to some outsiders given the Trump administration’s professed focus on combating antisemitism, enforcing a ban on transgender women in women’s sports and eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Most of that work would run through OCR.

Another department staffer affected by the RIF told Inside Higher Ed that the OCR cuts will make it even harder for universities to navigate the rapid changes to federal guidance on DEI, Title IX and more, making “proactive compliance” with things like the OCR’s Dear Colleague letter or Trump’s executive order on transgender athletes nearly impossible.

“There are plenty of administrators and general counsel at institutions who are willing to play ball with the new administration’s rules but don’t have the information to do so in good faith,” the former staffer said. “Now there’s nobody on the other line to help them understand.”