“You’re Terminated”: Under Siege at the DOE
Editor’s Note
On May 9, 2025, New Labor Forum’s “Working-Class Voices” columnist Kressent Pottenger interviewed Alyssa Picard. At the time, Picard was a supervisory employee in the Office of the Ombudsman at Federal Student Aid, a division of the Department of Education (DOE). By the time of the interview, Trump was already at war with the DOE. In March 2025, DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) had ordered a reduction in Force (RIF) of 1,340 workers. An Executive order, calling for elimination of the DOE, was signed on March 25. Picard, a member of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Local 2252 has since resigned. On July 1, 2025, she submitted a declaration in the NAACP v. McMahon case, challenging Trump’s efforts to dismantle the DOE.
I currently work in the Office of the Ombudsman at Federal Student Aid (FSA), a division within the Department of Education. Congress created the Office of the Ombudsman as a mechanism for dispute resolution for student loan borrowers who encounter problems in the course of their loan repayment history. I am a dues-paying member of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 2252. As a graduate student, I was active in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) at the University of Michigan, one of three universities in the United States that has had a graduate employee union since the 1970s. When I completed my PhD in history, I had only $6,000 in federal student debt. I went to work at the national AFT in Washington, D.C., where I developed a program of student debt clinics to assist AFT members across divisions: higher ed; K-12 teachers; nurses and health professionals; public employees; retirees—everybody with loan repayments. Recent graduates had a quarter of a million dollars in federal student debt. As union activists, they were afraid to speak out about student debt for fear of not getting tenure. After nine years at the AFT, I was recruited for a job in the Office of the Ombudsman. They were seeking people who had been advocates for borrowers and who were familiar with federal Title IV programs. The federal student loan program has existed in two forms. The Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL) was founded in 1965. FFEL loans were usually privately owned and guaranteed by the U.S. government but issued by banks or sometimes states. In the early 2000s, the department started experimenting with direct lending, where the Department of Education is the lender. Beginning in 2010, the FFEL program was terminated, and a system of direct-only loans has evolved over time. The FSA oversees all steps of the lending process. Caseworkers contract with loan servicers who manage the loans over their life and are responsible for cancellation and loan forgiveness programs.
[Biden’s] office was receiving communications from borrowers: “I have been in repayment for 25 years, and my loans have not been canceled.” Or, “Can you help me figure out what to do?”
I was hired as a caseworker in 2023, when the office was remote. I began just when the Biden administration was trying to relieve student loan debt and was blocked from doing so. During Biden’s efforts, the president’s office was receiving communications from borrowers: “I have been in repayment for 25 years, and my loans have not been canceled.” Or, “Can you help me figure out what to do?” Those are the kind of concerns that also come to the Office of the Ombudsman. The White House and the Department of Education are both tracking correspondence to make sure senders get an answer from an ombudsman caseworker or servicer. We are trained to operate according to the Hatch Act (https://osc.gov/Services/pages/hatchact.aspx), which is meant to ensure federal programs are carried out in a non-partisan way. It prohibits federal employees from talking with the public or among ourselves about politics in the workplace. We are given an explicit mandate: to embody good government to borrowers—they should come out of any conversation with us feeling like the government is working for them. In the years I have worked at FSA, there were times when the work was more rewarding than others. In July 2024, there was a court injunction placed on the SAVE plan, the Biden administration’s effort to lower student loan payments. That was a source of enormous frustration. There were eight million borrowers enrolled who were immediately placed in forbearance. Servicers were told not to process income-driven repayment applications that would enable people to get out of SAVE forbearance. A lot of applications, attempting to get public service loan forgiveness (PSLF) cancellation, have been functionally stalled since July of last year because of this court injunction. There was a two-month window from December 2024 to February 2025 where servicers were permitted to process income-driven repayment applications again. Then in February 2025, there was another stop-work injunction. Servicers are just beginning to process applications, but only for borrowers who have zero income, which is rare.
Too often, borrowers work with servicers who place them in forbearance . . . rather than telling them how to enroll in an income-driven repayment plan.
As a servicer, my job starts with a phone call to borrowers, bringing an organizer’s sensibility to these conversations. It is not easy to find a servicer who is well informed. Too often, borrowers work with servicers who place them in forbearance or deferment rather than telling them how to enroll in an income-driven repayment plan. These are borrowers who probably should have received PSLF, but did not know they had to apply for it. I talk to these borrowers through the steps needed to get their loans to cancel or get closer to cancellation. My best week at work was in June 2024, when I had a total of five borrowers. Among them, they had $1.3 million in debt canceled that one week. For example, one borrower had gone back to school to become a teacher in her 40s, after raising kids. She had taken out $75,000 in debt. I could see there were many times the loans had been placed in forbearance or deferment. But the servicer did not give her information about income-driven repayment—which would have enabled her to make progress toward having the loans canceled. So instead, the borrower had many interest-capitalization events. This term refers to adding unpaid interest to a loan, increasing the balance. As a result, her loan balance grew to over a quarter of a million dollars. I could see that all she had to do to cancel her loans was complete an application to consolidate what were then FFEL loans into direct loans. If she had had a computer that was modern enough to access federal student aid, she could have done that online, but she did not. So, she had to do it by hand and mail it in. That posed another problem. Her loan consolidation application would have been due at the end of a fiscal year, and there was a good chance there would be a government shutdown. If that happened, her application would be delayed, and she would miss the due date for cancellation. Fortunately, there was no shut down; so, she just mailed the application back. It got processed. I could tell she was unsure if everything would work out. On the day her loan balance was zeroed out, I called her. “I just want to let you know your balance is zero,” I told her. She was crying.
Every time they have to deal with their loans, they encounter some additional horrifying detail about how much the debt has grown. Or maybe someone spoke to them about their loan in a shaming or stigmatizing way.
I had another borrower who had consolidated her loans several times but still had some outstanding. She needed to consolidate one more time in order for all of her loans to be canceled simultaneously. She did not believe me and said every servicer had lied to her. She described the way her life had been impacted by student loan debt. She was in her early 60s and said she never got married, had kids, or bought a house. Her entire life had been shaped by this half million dollars of debt. A big part of my job is being mindful that the people we talk to have been traumatized by the loan process and the burden of debt. Every time they have to deal with their loans, they encounter some additional horrifying detail about how much the debt has grown. Or maybe someone spoke to them about their loan in a shaming or stigmatizing way. Many borrowed for programs they were not able to complete. There is an enormous amount of shame and misgiving about having taken on debt for educational pursuits that turned out not to pay off.
The Impact of DOGE
The regular workday for a caseworker changed when DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) began making cuts in 2025. Most caseworkers were benefiting from the flexibility of an hourly work program called Maxiflex (https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/work-schedules/fact-sheets/maxiflex-work-schedules/), a flexible work schedule program that allows workers to determine how to allocate their hours. For example, a worker might need to work eighty hours every two weeks; but under Maxiflex, that worker could determine when to work those eighty hours. Maxiflex was an unbelievable gift when it came to balancing work and family life. But DOGE wanted everybody in the office from eight to five. The result was a line out the door of people waiting to get through security to be physically present at their desk, maybe for a meeting that could have taken place on Zoom. Under Maxiflex, there were also reasonable accommodations for telework, which protected people with disabilities under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
Since the creation of DOGE, however, we have been repeatedly informed that the Secretary of Education will personally be making decisions about reasonable accommodation agreements that include any element of telework. We have a typical package of federal employment benefits that include health and dental benefits as well as vision and life insurance, for which the employee pays a share of the premium. Sick days are earned at four hours per pay period for full-time workers. Regardless of length of employment, vacation time is earned at four, six, or eight hours per pay period. It is common for formerly private-sector workers to negotiate their rate of vacation accrual privately, as individuals. We have access to the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), the federal equivalent of a 401 K retirement plan. Long-time federal employees will see a pay cut in the form of higher contributions to the Federal Employee Retirement System.
On February 12, 2025, our department experienced its first DOGE cut—termination of probationary employees. We lost about eight people. That was a big blow. Those people were doing incredibly valuable work right up until they received an email that said, “You’re being terminated.” They immediately lost access to their computer systems and could not make contact with HR in order to sign up for COBRA, which allows workers to continue with their health insurance program despite no longer being employed. They also could not find out where their last paycheck would be sent. The termination letter said, “We’re terminating you for performance reasons.” They were not terminated for performance reasons, but because the employer has the right to terminate workers who are probationary. This letter, stating it was due to performance reasons, caused problems when they went to file for unemployment. They needed a corrected letter, which took more than a month to be issued. Then, DOGE began making RIFs (reductions in force). In prior administrations, an RIF occurred when a federal agency determined to lay off a certain percentage of federal employees due to an organizational change versus performance. This would be accomplished by determining which organizational units and geographical areas would be affected by an RIF. Affected positions would be called the competitive area. A list would then be created to determine which positions would be impacted, and decisions would be made on how to carry out the RIF based on work status, seniority, length of service, or performance. For example, some workers might be eligible for a reassignment to another agency, which could potentially displace other workers with less seniority. Nothing like that has occurred in any DOGE RIF that I have heard about thus far.
DOGE [’s] termination letter said, “We’re terminating you for performance reasons.” . . . This letter . . . caused problems when [people] went to file for unemployment.
Under DOGE, we had two whole divisions RIF’d on March 11. Imagine an organizational chart of the Department of Education which had the Office of the Ombudsman, and four separate divisions in it. The prior process for RIFs was abandoned by DOGE. Instead, they just came in and said, “We are eliminating these two divisions.” There were 343 employees in those two divisions with more seniority than I have. If this process had been conducted in a normal way, they would have been able to bump me because I had less seniority. However, they are conducting RIFs completely out of line with the law. The Institute for Education Sciences, which is responsible for the nation’s annual report card, was eliminated outright. The student experience and aid delivery apparatus, called “the vendor oversight group,” was responsible for the supervision of student loan servicers. It became the vendor management group. Many individuals who were primary points of contact with student loan servicers were RIF’d. The relationships through which federal student aid had conducted its business with servicers were all severed. The current administration has repeatedly emphasized that FSA continues to have a laser-like focus on getting new loans out the door. They are really aware that if there are problems encountered in the disbursement of needs-based Pell grants or new loans, that will cause political problems across constituencies. They have hacked away at everything that is not creating the loan portfolio.
[M]anagement advised everybody to drink water and take deep breaths. That everything would be fine . . . Then they immediately cut a third to a half of the employees of the Department of Education.
When the RIF in March took place, management advised everybody to drink water and take deep breaths. That everything would be fine. I think many employees experienced that as having offered some level of reassurance—that nothing disastrous was about to happen. Then they immediately cut a third to a half of the employees of the Department of Education. Linda McMahon, the confirmed Secretary of Education, sent out an email to all Department of Education staff with the subject line “Our Final Mission.” The final mission is to shut down the Department of Education. McMahon was essentially lauding everybody who was receiving this email for their willingness to be a participant in the department’s final mission of obliterating itself. The Department of Education is now in control of people who have accepted the theory of the Unitary Executive. This is the theory that the president can fire heads of federal agencies as well as control policy decisions within these agencies. They are willing to take every conceivable action to move that theory down the football field. Employees who are left are essentially being held hostage to that vision. The union has been able to develop some messaging to talk about the bigger picture: the way this RIF will impact the ability of many people to seek higher education or to seek recourse around fraudulent loans. The National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have both filed lawsuits regarding the RIFs. The lawsuit brought by unions at other agencies regarding the separation of the probationary employees resulted in an order that those probationary employees be returned to work. The probationary employees who were separated in the Office of the Ombudsman are still on our organizational charts but are not performing duties. Our ability to get work done for borrowers has been
hobbled.
These are huge issues for all of higher education. They are reducing the amount of overhead that institutions can charge for the administration of grants; a gargantuan operational cut to institutions that receive them. This will have implications on the availability of higher education for Americans across political and economic categories. Nobody is successfully telling the story of the magnitude of this problem. Many of the institutions that we have built as progressives, including labor unions, are not prepared for fighting an authoritarian takeover of a constitutional republic. The sooner the people who are leading those progressive institutions are real about it, the better. Everybody has to get on the field and do the work.
Author Biography
Kressent Pottenger holds an MA Labor Studies from The Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at CUNY, and was awarded the SEIU 925 Research Fellowship by Wayne State University in 2012. She is currently working on a research project about 925 and women organizing in the workplace.
