Inside Higher Ed has a summary up this morning of how deeply this weeks' cuts at the Department of Education are likely to be felt.
This section on financial aid and loans makes it feel hard to breathe. The long-awaited roll-out of the simplified FAFSA last year was stymied by short staffing that required the department to use contractors to build the technical side. It didn't go well. Now, they've cut staff even further.
To be clear, people who never needed financial aid are deciding that those who do need aid will have to get by with a fraction of the staff that the already-stretched system had a year ago.
And all of this is happening in March, when colleges need to be finalizing award packages and families and students are having to decide if college is even possible any more and there'll be no one answering the phones to answer their questions.
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.
I'm wishing today – as I do every day – that every poor and working-class student was routinely taught about political organizing and advocacy as students whose life chances are shaped by public policy and by public indifference to their life circumstances.
In the meantime, it's on the rest of us to be demanding so much better of our federal government.
