A Government Accountability Office review of federal student loan servicing (GAO-26-108534), published in 2026, found that the Education Department cut its workforce by about half and stopped key oversight activities of the companies that service its more than $1.6 trillion loan portfolio. Among the findings, reported alongside coverage by NPR: the department's Office of Federal Student Aid halted, in February 2025, its reviews of the accuracy of loan servicers' records — the checks meant to keep borrowers' account data correct.
What did the report find?
GAO examined whether the department retained the capacity to carry out its statutory responsibilities over the loan program. It concluded that the staffing reductions and paused oversight activities left gaps in the department's ability to monitor servicer performance. Servicers handle billing, payment processing, income-driven repayment enrollment, and forgiveness applications for tens of millions of borrowers; the accuracy of their records determines balances, eligibility determinations, and forgiveness counts.
GAO recommended the department address the oversight gaps, including restoring the capacity to verify servicer record accuracy. The report followed earlier GAO work, going back to a 2016 review, that found long-standing weaknesses in how the department oversees its servicing contracts.
Why does servicer oversight matter?
Servicer errors have concrete consequences for borrowers. Misrecorded payments can delay forgiveness credit, incorrect income-driven repayment amounts can inflate balances, and processing mistakes on forbearance or consolidation can change a borrower's timeline by years. Oversight — contract reviews, record accuracy checks, and performance metrics — is the mechanism the department uses to catch and correct those errors before borrowers are harmed.
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What happens next?
GAO's recommendations give Congress and the department a checklist: the department must decide how to rebuild oversight capacity within its new staffing levels, and congressional committees have signaled they will track whether record-accuracy reviews resume. Borrowers can also check their own records: payment counts and forgiveness progress are available through their servicer accounts and the department's loan records.
What it means for you
If you have a federal student loan, this report is about the accuracy of your account. With routine record checks paused, the risk of an error sitting uncorrected in your payment history is higher, and that matters most if you are working toward income-driven repayment forgiveness or Public Service Loan Forgiveness. The practical step auditors and borrower advocates suggest: download and keep your own payment history periodically, verify your payment count, and dispute discrepancies in writing so there is a record.
The timing sharpens the findings. The department's staffing reductions came as the portfolio shifted between servicing contractors and as millions of borrowers re-entered repayment after the pandemic pause — a period when record errors are most likely and most consequential. GAO's recommendations therefore focus on rebuilding verification capacity and on making the department's remaining oversight resources target the highest-risk servicing activities.