Corey Turner

But department officials told GAO the problem was staff capacity.

The reviews stopped early last year as the administration began cutting the student loan office by nearly half.

Corey Turner, NPR News.

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GAO found the U.S.

Department of Education stopped two key pieces of oversight under President Trump.

One, staff used to listen back to recordings of phone calls between borrowers and call center workers to make sure they were getting accurate information.

And two, department staff would do special data accuracy checks because loan servicer records can be pretty unreliable.

Before these reviews stopped, GAO found that four of the five servicers failed that data check.

The Trump administration says these reviews do not meaningfully measure servicer performance.

But department officials told GAO the problem was staff capacity.

The reviews stopped early last year as the administration began cutting the student loan office by nearly half.

Corey Turner, NPR News.

Listen to this podcast sponsor-free on Amazon Music with a Prime membership or any podcast app by subscribing to NPR News Now Plus at plus.npr.org.

That's plus.npr.org.

The data comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and shows that in the last quarter of 2025, roughly a million federal student loan borrowers plunged into default.

And researchers say they expect that number to keep growing.

Older federal data shows millions of borrowers on a downward escalator toward default, missing month after month of payments.

As of the end of September, nearly 9 million borrowers were either already in default or on the last step.