Warren, Sanders, Senators Demand Education Secretary McMahon Reinstate Federal Student Aid Workers
Unprecedented mass firings threaten ED’s ability to address families’ and borrowers’ financial aid complaints
“Parents, students, and borrowers should have access to a well-functioning federal student aid system that reliably lowers education costs.”
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, led a letter to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon regarding the Trump Administration’s decision to slash the capacity of Federal Student Aid (FSA) to handle student aid complaints.
Warren and Sanders were joined by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Alex Padilla (D-Cal.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)
On March 4, 2025, Politico reported that the Department of Education (ED) fired more than one third of the staff that handled complaints submitted on FSA’s website. One week later, ED purged half of its entire workforce, including by making “severe” employment cuts at the FSA office responsible for addressing student aid complaints.
“ED’s actions will hurt parents trying to understand how to submit the FAFSA correctly so that they can afford to send their child to college, veterans whose loan repayment status has been processed incorrectly due to their deployment, and students whose aid is being improperly withheld by predatory for-profit schools,” wrote the lawmakers.
The Department also reportedly intends to remove the “Submit a Complaint” button from FSA’s website. By doing so, the department risks abandoning the millions of parents, students, and borrowers who rely on a functioning federal student aid system to lower education costs.
In Fiscal Year 2024, FSA received nearly 300,000 complaints from parents, students, and borrowers, 91 percent of which were submitted online. Every year, FSA produces a report analyzing these complaints and making policy recommendations in response. Deterring borrowers from submitting complaints — and slashing FSA’s capacity to review those complaints — will make it more difficult for ED to uncover and address problems in the federal student aid system. Hindering the complaint system will also make it more difficult for the government to take action against scammers who target borrowers.
“Each year ED refers thousands of complaints related to student loan scams to state attorneys general. Weakening FSA’s complaint system will impair the government’s ability to crack down on these scams, leaving borrowers at greater risk of being cheated out of their money,” continued the lawmakers.
A senior ED employee inexplicably called this attempt to make it more difficult for borrowers to get help with their complaints “an overall win.”
“Hampering the FSA complaint system does nothing to increase government efficiency and instead will make it more difficult for policymakers to create a better functioning, more efficient federal aid system for families,” concluded the lawmakers.
The lawmakers urged McMahon to immediately restore all fired FSA employees responsible for reviewing student aid complaints and refrain from taking any measures to deter the submission of complaints.
They requested that McMahon provide information regarding ED’s decisions to obstruct the FSA complaint system and regarding the impacts of those decisions on borrowers and families by April 2, 2025.
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