How DOE Cuts Will Impact Students

Primary Impact Is On Higher Ed

Tuesday night, leadership of the Department of Education announced that it was eliminating over half of its employees.

[NOTE: After drafting this, two judges have ordered that federal employees fired by OPM, including the DOE, were to be reinstated. So we’ll see where things end up through the appeals process.]

While Trump campaigned on doing away with the department or at least cannibalizing its functions and shifting them to non-education related departments and Linda McMahon said in her confirmation hearing that she wanted to work herself out of a job, the timeline and scope of these changes were unknown. At least until the news of the firings broke, which is how we’ve learned about each of the administration’s attempts to starve federal government functions (thankfully, a judge today ordered the rehiring of those improperly terminated by the Office of Personnel Management).

Yesterday morning, Inside Higher Ed did a deep dive on the impact of the downsizing. The short version is that it is not good at all.

If there is any good news, it is that preliminary reports suggest that K-12 education will not be affected to the same degree. However, there are other agencies involved. The USDA is cutting $1 Billion is food supports that went to food pantries and school lunches.

IHE reports that one area significantly impacted by the DOE firings is in the broad area of statistics and data management: “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.” I suppose this isn’t surprising when, in the president’s first term, he said that COVID testing was bad because it uncovered new cases so it was better to do less testing.

I wonder how this will impact the data gathering function of IPEDS, the major repository of information from universities across the country. How will the data be gathered? Will anyone evaluate the results? What happens to the Higher Ed dashboards launched during the Obama administration, designed to enhance informed student choice?

Another important area impacted is in the Office of Federal Student Aid, which manages FAFSA, the program that authorizes federal student loans. While IHE doesn’t have precise numbers, it looks like OFSA was reduced by about a third.

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.

It is quite likely that reduced capacity will result in an increase of denied applications, as time will be devoted to processing the cleanest applications. That means that underserved populations may be on the losing end of the stick (which is consistent with the administration’s anti-DEI obsession). Eliminating call support will make unusual cases hard to process.

Another area hit hard is the Office of Civil Rights, tasked with investigating discrimination, harassment, and even the administration’s antisemitism push.

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.

These will be handled by about half of the OCR staff who were there on Monday. And they will be working out of only five regional offices instead of the previous dozen. I expect that the scarce resources will be devoted to the concerns of importance to the administration and not to students in general.

How can Trump, McMahon, and Musk make these changes without seriously damaging students and the institutions they attend? One answer is that they won’t. This is part of the war of higher ed in general and diversity in particular.

But reporting yesterday in Wired (now paywalled) about how the DOGE takeover of government unfolded offers some serious possibilities. The entire article is shocking in the picture it paints of the audacity and hubris of the DOGE boys.

I was able to read the very long story before it was locked up. In the last quarter of the piece, it shifts to consideration of how the DOGE team is using AI to answer government questions. What they are currently using is a clunky first-generation system, but they will be working on enhancements.

So when the DOE is eliminating staff and ending call centers for FAFSA, maybe AI is going to be managing the screening functions for the smoothest applications. Maybe they think AI is going to scrape data files and do the IPEDS summaries. They may think that AI will be able to handle the investigative steps involved in OCR investigations.

Every one of these functions has complicated and varied inputs that seem like they would be hard to systematize. But they will have accomplished their goal of reducing federal employees. I’m not holding my breath to see whether functionality continues.

It may be that I’m just a luddite and too skittish about the promise and peril of AI. Or maybe Battlestar Galactica convinced me that the cyborgs first follow the wishes of their masters…until they don’t.