An hours-long outage Wednesday on StudentAid.gov, the federal website for student loans and financial aid, underscored what critics say are the risks of rapid cutbacks at the the Department of Education, as President Donald Trump aims to dismantle the agency.
Starting midday Wednesday, dozens of visitors to StudentAid.gov reported outages to Downdetector. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, a group of people who handle colleges' financial aid awards, said it had received reports of users experiencing technical issues and having trouble completing the FAFSA, a form that's required for financial aid at colleges nationwide.
“NASFAA is seeking clarity on why the form is down and when issues will be resolved, though troubleshooting could be complicated by yesterday’s staff reductions,” the group said on X.
The developers and IT support staff who worked on the FAFSA form were hard hit in the Education Department's layoffs Tuesday, along with staff buyouts and the termination of probationary employees. In all, the Education Department has reduced its staff by half, to roughly 2,000, since Trump took office.
A list of laid-off staff obtained and verified by AP shows more than 300 people cut from Federal Student Aid — two dozen of them from Federal Student Aid's technology division. That included the entire team responsible for systems supporting the FAFSA form, a person with knowledge of the outage told The Associated Press, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation. While laid-off staffers are still technically employed until March 21, they had limited access to their email, phones and computers, making a response to the outage difficult, the person said. At one point Wednesday, about 70 people had joined a Teams call to try to pinpoint the cause of the outage.
The call continued for hours. By Wednesday evening, the website carried a banner claiming “Planned Maintenance” was underway, and login access was cut off.
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the outage.
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