WASHINGTON (AP) — An hours-long outage Wednesday on StudentAid.gov, the federal website for student loans and financial aid, underscored the risks in rapidly gutting the Department of Education, as President Donald Trump aims to dismantle the agency.
Hundreds of users reported FAFSA outages to Downdetector starting midday Wednesday, saying they were having trouble completing the form, which is required for financial aid at colleges nationwide. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, a group of people who handle colleges’ financial aid awards, also received reports of users experiencing technical issues and having trouble completing the FAFSA.
“We’ve been trying to get more clarity on why it’s down,” said Allie Bidwell Arcese, a spokeswoman for NASFAA. The Education Department hadn’t shared any information on the outage, she said. “The maintenance and troubleshooting may be impacted by yesterday’s layoffs.”
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.
Reports of outages died down by late Wednesday night.
Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said the layoffs didn’t affect employees working on the FAFSA form or student loan servicing. They were implemented “carefully and in compliance with all applicable regulations and laws,” Biedermann said in a statement.
“They are strategic, internal-facing cuts that will not directly impact students and families,” she said.
Problems with the FAFSA had vexed the administration of former President Joe Biden, drawing rebuke from Republicans. The form was overhauled last year in an attempt to simplify it, but technical problems blocked students from submitting forms or bungled financial aid calculations.
Advocates had feared frustration would lead thousands of students to give up on going to college at all. But overall freshman enrollment at U.S. colleges increased over the previous year.
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Editor’s note: A previous version of this story said freshman enrollment at U.S. colleges had dropped in fall 2024. That data was corrected in January by the National Student Clearinghouse, which cited an error in its methodology. Freshman enrollment increased over the previous year.
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