President Donald Trump announced on Friday that two key functions of the agency that seeks to dismantle, the Department of Education, will be transferred to new departments: the administration of small businesses will assume student loans, and the Department of Health and Human Services will take special needs and nutritional efforts.
“I mean that I have decided that the SBA, the administration of small businesses, headed by Kelly Loeffler, [who] He is an excellent person, he will handle the entire student loan portfolio, “he said.
“We have a portfolio that is very large, many loans, tens of thousands of loans, a quite complicated treatment. And that comes out of the department of education immediately,” Trump said, adding that he believes that it will be “served much better” than it has been.
The federal federal federal aid office on the Department of Education is currently supervised, and manages not tens of thousands of dollars in loans but $ 1.6 billion on loans for 43 million people.
President Donald Trump has an executive order after signing it together with the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon (R) in the East of the White House in Washington, on March 20, 2025.
Nathan Howard/Reuters
Trump said Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s HHS will handle “special needs and all nutrition programs and everything else”, admitting that it is “quite complex.”
“These two elements will be taken from the Department of Education, and then all we have to do is get the students to obtain guidance from the people who love them and appreciate them,” Trump said.
The president said that the central functions would remain intact.
“Pell subsidies, Title 1, financing resources for children with disabilities and special needs will be completely preserved,” Trump said Thursday before signing the bill. “They will be preserved in its entirety and redistributed to other agencies and departments that will take care of them very well.”
An opinion shows a poster during a defense of our schools to protest the executive order of President Donald Trump to close the USDepartment of Education outside his building in Washington, on March 21, 2025.
Kent Nishimura/Reuters
The president offered no detail about how these portfolios would be transferred exactly to other agencies, saying that it would only happen “immediately.”
It is likely that at least one component of the plan, transfer the student loan system to another department, in front of a great legal setback.
It is likely that the central legal problem will focus on the Higher Education Law of 1965, which stipulates that the Federal Student Assistance Office must be under the scope of the Secretary of Education.
“The Congress has accused the Secretary of Education of the Federal Student Aid Program by issuing student loans and subsidies to support the achievement of the higher education of the students,” said Andrew Cook, press secretary of the American Federation of Masters. “The Federal Student Assistance Office of the Department has the mandate to do so and has the unique experience to manage the Student Aid Complex.”
The president of AFT, Randi Weingarten, was more forceful: “See you in court,” he said in a statement after Trump signed the executive order on Thursday.
In addition, the SBA, which already Handles billions of dollars on loans Every year, he has faced his own cuts since Trump took office, saying he would Reduce your staff by 43% in the middle of the reorganization of the entire agency.
The SBA said that “it would eliminate approximately 2,700 active positions of a total active workforce of almost 6,500 through voluntary resignations, the expiration of the Covid era and other term appointments, and a limited number of reductions in force.”
The Federal Student Association uses more than 1,000 employees, but it is not clear if these employees would move under the SBA or how the agency would handle an influx of loans to manage.
