Backlog of 27,000 Complaints Grows Amid Education Department Cuts

A key office within the U.S. Department of Education is struggling under a ballooning backlog of more than 27,000 unresolved complaints, resulting from deep staffing cuts within the Department, combined with a rapid change in administrative priorities.

The Federal Student Aid Office of the Ombudsman—an office responsible for handling general disputes involving colleges and students as well as student loan borrowers and loan servicers—saw its backlog grow by roughly 11,000 cases between March and August, a 69 percent increase in only five months.

The pileup comes at a time when student loan borrowers are grappling with resumed repayment obligations, tightened repayment programs, and a challenging job market. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts pressed Education Secretary Linda McMahon for answers, warning that the Department’s ability to carry out its core mission is at risk.

“The Trump administration is abandoning Americans who have been scammed by their student loan servicers or have problems with their loans,” Senator Warren told NBC News. “I’m pushing Secretary McMahon because families across this country deserve answers about her efforts to dismantle the Department of Education.”

The 27,000-complaint figure appeared buried within the fine print of a July 21 letter from the Department’s Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs to Senator Warren. The letter disclosed that the ombudsman office closed only 1,122 complaints in May, the most recent month with available data. At the current pace, the office processes far fewer cases than it receives—an average of only about 1,833 new complaints per month since mid-March or only about 39 percent of the inbound cases.

That’s because the FSA’s staffing shortfall appears to be severe. According to a sworn declaration from former ombudsman office analyst Rachel Gittleman, this office has shrunk from 63 staff members at the start of the year to only 25 today—a 60 percent decline. When the Trump Administration began implementing layoffs in mid-March, the office was already managing a backlog of 16,000 unresolved complaints.

If resolution rates remain near May’s level, the backlog will continue to grow “by hundreds of complaints per month,” Senator Warren wrote in an August follow-up letter. She also pointed out that it remains unclear how many of the 1,122 complaints closed in May were actually resolved to the satisfaction of students or borrowers.

The backlog is part of a broader upheaval within the Department of Education. President Trump vowed to close the agency entirely—a move that would require Congressional approval. Then Secretary McMahon described her role as helping to wind down its operations; in November, McMahon authorized the transfer of some of its offices to other government agencies.

Earlier in Marc,h the administration cut nearly 1,400 employees across the Department, a move upheld without explanation by the Supreme Court in June. Those layoffs were framed by McMahon and other officials as a step toward greater efficiency, the elimination of “excess bureaucracy,” and a sharper focus on delivering only those programs explicitly authorized by statute.

“Moving forward, we must establish accountability measures throughout the student aid process and simultaneously eliminate excess bureaucracy and spending,” Sarah Ursprung, the Department’s top liaison to Congress, wrote in the July 21 letter to Warren. The aim, she said, was to streamline operations, not to abandon the Department’s core services.

Critics disagree. Warren argues that the layoffs and restructuring were never efficiency measures, but a deliberate dismantling of services on which a variety of stakeholders depend. “The American people deserve to know how your policies are impacting services and programs that millions of students and families across the country rely upon,” she wrote to McMahon.

Senator Warren’s August letter demanded detailed explanations from McMahon on how the Department will carry out its essential functions with such a reduced workforce. Her question topics ranged from the future of income-driven repayment (IDR) plans and student loan forgiveness efforts to the Department’s oversight of loan servicers along with the status of civil rights complaints, which we examine later in this article.

The Massachusetts senator pointed to the 27,000-case backlog as a concrete measure of the Department’s decline in capacity. She underscored the gap between incoming complaints and the resolution rate, warning that without a dramatic increase in processing speed “the backlog will continue to grow by hundreds of complaints per month.”

Her concerns extend beyond the ombudsman’s office. As we’ll discuss, a separate application backlog also affects roughly 1.1 million borrowers still seeking to enter more economical and generally superior IDR plans, which cap monthly payments based on income and family size. Warren criticized McMahon’s prior explanations for being “extraordinarily vague” about how the Department plans to work with loan servicers to address both backlogs.

Public frustration with the ombudsman office has been building for months. Borrowers report difficulty reaching the office by phone or email, long waits for responses, and, in some cases, messages stating that complaints would no longer be processed.

Although some delays and access issues predate the current administration, the combination of increased complaint volume and diminished staffing further damaged the situation. In 2024, the office received more than 200,000 complaints, up almost 100 percent from about 101,500 in 2022. Annual reports from the Biden Administration’s years show spikes in disputes during periods when pandemic-era payment pauses ended, and loan forgiveness initiatives collapsed in the federal courts.

The ombudsman office’s role is not merely to resolve individual borrower disputes. It also serves FSA as an early warning system for financial aid problems with colleges, within the loan program, and with various subcontractors. But with its staff stretched so thin, the office’s ability to detect patterns of administrative failure is at risk.

The timing of the backlog’s growth could hardly be worse for borrowers. Repayment obligations have resumed in full force after a multi-year pause during the pandemic, and the labor market remains uncertain. Many borrowers depend on the ombudsman office to resolve errors in billing, ensure proper credit for payments, or intervene in cases of servicer misconduct. This is especially true of the two million borrowers in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program because they are on an accelerated 10-year repayment timetable.

Jessica Thompson, senior vice president of The Institute for College Access & Success, told NBC that the backlog is likely to “exponentially grow” without immediate changes. “They don’t have nearly enough capacity to make headway on complaints,” she said.

This threat is twofold: Individual borrowers could face prolonged uncertainty and possible financial harm, while the student loan system as a whole could lose one of its most important oversight functions. The ombudsman office is uniquely positioned to identify patterns of errors or abuses—but only if it has the resources to investigate complaints as they happen.

As disclosed in a September court filing, the 27,000-case ombudsman’s office backlog is only part of the Department’s challenges. The separate queue of 1.1 million borrowers awaiting entry into income-driven repayment plans—an intractable problem since last March—highlights the scope of FSA’s shortfall in services.

Both problems stem from the same issues: reduced staffing and changing administrative priorities. Senator Warren emphasized that delays in either area can have cascading consequences for borrowers, potentially leading to missed payments, damaged credit, and loss of access to affordable repayment options.

The ombudsman’s office backlog also exists alongside a third backlog within the Department, this time in civil rights cases.

The Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) now faces its own backlog of more than 20,000 pending civil rights cases after shutting down all but five of its regional offices. This creates a dual accountability gap: borrowers can’t get help with servicer problems, while students facing discrimination have nowhere to turn except to private attorneys. Although both crises stem from the layoffs, the civil rights backlog represents an additional collapse in the Department’s consumer protection functions.

That 20,000-case backlog would have been almost 3,500 larger had the Department not dismissed so many new cases.

According to court documents released in July, the OCR—which also lost half its workforce in the layoffs—dismissed more than 3,424 complaints between March and June. Voluntary agreements, settlements or technical assistance ended 290 of these cases, and 96 complaints were “resolved” because of insufficient evidence within an investigation. Why the other 3,014 cases were suddenly dismissed remains unclear.

During that time period, OCR also received 4,833 new complaints. Of these, the office only opened 309 for investigations; it also launched 26 “directed” investigations on its own initiative without having received any complaints from citizens. In other words, its investigation rate was a paltry 6.9 percent.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration quietly rebranded this FSA division as the “Office of Consumer Education and Ombudsman” in September. A long-winded release said the change should help the agency “proactively improve financial literacy among students, parents, and borrowers so that they are better equipped to make careful borrowing decisions and responsibly manage their federal student loan debt.”

In other words, the Department announced a policy pivot geared towards proactive problem prevention, at the same time, it’s still sitting on 27,000 unresolved complaints in one division and 20,000 in another. That curious policy switch led observers to question whether the Department might view these two backlogs as permanent by design.

But in any event, this new branding and mission adjustment does nothing to clear the backlogs, to assist borrowers waiting months for help with billing errors or payment misapplications, or to defend students against civil rights violations.

Whether the Department of Education can reverse these complaint backlogs—or even slow their growth—remains unclear. Without a significant increase in staffing or a dramatic efficiency improvement, the backlogs will likely persist.

The tense standoff between Warren and McMahon also encompasses a larger policy debate about the federal government’s role in higher education. For the Administration, reducing the Department’s scope is a policy goal in and of itself. But for critics like Lhamon, these actions constitute a dereliction of duty that leaves students and borrowers with few recourses.

Millions will be watching for signs that suggest the Department intends to at least partially restore its complaint-handling capabilities. In the meantime, these backlogs continue to grow with no clear resolution on the horizon.