Dr. Bradley Custer

Troy Swanson: Bradley, welcome to Circulating Ideas.

Bradley Custer: Thank you, Troy.

Troy Swanson: I’m excited you can be here. I know there’s some difficult conversations, but I appreciate you sharing. But before we get into everything, can you give us an overview of your professional career in education so that our listeners have an appreciation where you’re coming from?

Bradley Custer: I went to college to major in music education with the intention of becoming a school band teacher, but as a first year college student, I became entirely enamored with college itself. I was fascinated by the faculty and the administrators, by the programs, and campus life in general. So I decided to pursue a career in higher education instead of K-12 education. I got a Master’s in Student Affairs and started my first full-time job at Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois, the longtime professional home of Troy Swanson. After that I went to Michigan State University for my PhD in higher education.

I had every intention of going back into college administration, but I learned how much I enjoyed researching and writing about higher education policy, and that opened up a whole new career path for me. I moved to Washington DC to work as a researcher at a nonprofit organization. Much of the work that I did was about federal financial aid policy, and that’s what led me to my most recent role at the US Department of Education.

Troy Swanson: It’s been exciting to see all of your success over the years and that’s also why I think those of us that were at Moraine who knew you back in the day felt it so acutely when you’ve been part of this piece of history. So maybe we could just jump in and talk about your role at the Department of Ed. What were you working on? How did this fit into the department’s broader mission before the recent political shifts?

Bradley Custer: For a little more than two years, I was a career civil servant in the US Department of Education. That is to say that I was not a political appointee of the Biden administration. I worked for the federal government. I worked in the Office of Federal Student Aid, which is the largest office within the Education Department. Federal Student Aid administers more than $120 billion in federal financial aid to college students through their colleges every year. That’s Pell Grants, work study, and student loans.

I worked in the Ombudsman Office, which is one of the only customer-facing offices at the US Department of Education. I directly helped people with complicated issues related to their student loans. The Ombudsman Office has been around since the late 1990s, but it did not have a very good reputation for helping people. Leadership at Federal Student Aid believed it was important to do a better job of helping student loan borrowers, so we built up capacity. We hired a lot of great workers, and in the short time that I was there, I think we helped a lot of people.

Troy Swanson: That’s fantastic. I think Department of Ed is one of those, when you say student loans, people know student loans, but a lot of the other work that’s done within DOE, I don’t know that many people in the public really recognize, like those of us in education have an idea of it, but others may not. The Department of Ed has played such a crucial role in protecting students, enforcing civil rights, funding institutions. Maybe talk about some of those different roles and the key accomplishments or ongoing initiatives that you and your colleagues led the way and were proud of over the time you were there.

Bradley Custer: Since most of my work was focused on student loans, I’m gonna go back to the student loan topic for a little bit. 42 million Americans hold more than $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, and this has become a problem because many of those people can’t afford their student loan payments, and a major contributor to that has been the fact that the programs that are supposed to help student loan borrowers don’t work.

So it was a major priority of the Biden administration to fix some of those things, and the best example of this is the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, or PSLF. PSLF is a program that says if you work at a nonprofit organization, a government agency, the military, and you work for 10 years while you’re making student loan payments, any balance that you have left over gets forgiven. This program was created by Congress in 2007. Observers noticed at the end of 2017, 18, 19, in the years just before the pandemic, that almost no one was getting forgiveness under the PSLF program. And that is largely because the companies that manage student loan accounts, we call them student loan servicers, did such a bad job of keeping track of people’s payments, and they often gave incorrect information to student loan borrowers.

So during the Biden administration, throughout the pandemic, the Education Department used legal flexibilities as part of the pandemic to go back and correct millions of student loan records. As a result, by the end of the Biden administration, we forgave nearly $184 billion in student loan debt for 5 million people, and for the PSLF program, specifically, before the Biden administration, only about 7,000 people ever got PSLF forgiveness. And at the end, we were at just over 1 million borrowers getting PSLF. These fixes are something that all of us at Federal Student Aid worked on, including myself in the Ombudsman office, and it’s something that we’re very proud of.

Troy Swanson: It’s impressive, and I think all of us that listen know this translates into the real impact in people’s lives and into the economy really too when you’re freeing up spending from giving your money over to a student loan. As someone who has had student loans in the past, you’re able to move that in other directions. And Bradley, I know you didn’t work across all the offices, but could you maybe just mention a little bit of the big picture outside of just student loans, of some things that the Department of Ed also covered civil rights, I know, the different student protections. Can you just give us a quick mention of some of that?

Bradley Custer: Absolutely. I think you’re right that there are two basic things. The Education Department gives out money, and we enforce civil rights. Our Office of Civil Rights investigates K-12 and higher education institutions when students are facing any kind of discrimination based on disability or sex or race of course, anything else like that. They play a major role in making sure that students receive a fair education.

The other big side of the education department other than federal student aid, which deals mostly with funding for colleges, are all the programs that fund K-12 schools, Title I, all of this funding that is meant to provide support to schools, especially in communities that don’t have the tax base to support all of their needs. So we really play a critical role in funding and oversight of the quality of schools and colleges and universities.

Troy Swanson: Great. Thank you for that. And I know it’s asking a lot sometimes to summarize such big, national efforts, so I appreciate it. So when the administration changed, and there was a new direction and the political leadership began reshaping the department, what signs did you see that things were beginning to unravel, both in terms of policy and institutional culture?

Bradley Custer: I will never forget how quickly the messaging from the education department changed after President Trump was inaugurated on January 20th. I follow the Education Department on several different platforms. I think it was on Facebook where I saw it the first, just days after the administration changed, they were releasing statements with graphics about eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at schools and colleges. They began attacking transgender students, and it was really a hard pill to swallow for me as someone who at that time was still working at an agency that seemed to care more about attacking schools and students than it did about helping them.

But we didn’t have much time to focus on that because shortly after that was a whole barrage of things. The first wave of attacks on federal workers came again just days after the administration came into power and the first group of employees at the Education Department that were affected were those who were supposedly working on DEI initiatives within the department. It’s not clear how those folks were identified, or if they even were working on DEI initiatives. There didn’t seem to be an appeals process for that, but a whole group of people were put on paid administrative leave. They were immediately locked out of their offices, out of their computers. And those people some of them have only just recently been able to go back to work at the end of August and early September.

Then it was the probationary workers. These were the people who just began new jobs in federal government. Usually within a year, sometimes within two years, those people were terminated through a series of lawsuits and other things. Some of them got their jobs back, some didn’t. But then came the next big thing, which was Elon Musk and his “fork in the road.” This was something that he used at Twitter to try to get people to quit. Some people called it “the buyout.” It was officially called the Deferred Resignation or DRP program, and the objective was that if you took this offer, you would be paid as usual through the end of September and you would not have to work. Those people just finished out their term of paid leave at the end of September. About 150,000 workers from across the federal government took the fork in the road, but only about 250 people at the Education Department took that route. Me and my colleagues thought, “this is illegal,” and I still believe the fork in the road was illegal.

Something that I’ll always remember is watching Senator Tim Kaine from Virginia, exasperated on the floor of the Senate, saying to federal workers, “Do not be fooled by Donald Trump’s trick. There is no budget line item approved by Congress that allows the federal government to pay federal workers for seven months and do no work.” So naturally, most of us thought it was illegal. We didn’t take the fork, but that would only be the beginning for what was to become a nightmare for all of us.

Troy Swanson: So you were eventually removed from your position as part of this. Can you talk about how that went and then what happened? Were you removed or did you officially resign?

Bradley Custer: My word for it is “illegally fired.” In March, following the expiration date of the fork offer, about 1,300 people at the Education Department, myself included, were notified that we would be terminated. My whole team within the Ombudsman office was cut, and we were supposed to be fired in June, but a federal court and then another federal appeals court intervened and blocked our firing for a little while longer. The Supreme Court in July cleared the way for us to be fired in August.

During that time, we were on paid administrative leave similar to the people who took the fork, but the day after we were notified in March, we were locked out of all of our systems. I worked fully remotely, so I was just at home. All we could access was our email and we could only email people within the Education Department. About a week later, even that was shut off so all summer we had no access to our systems and so there was no more work for us to do. And so, like I said on August 1st, that was our last official day as employees of the Education Department. Following that, fortunately most people have reported that the agency has done a decent job in paying out our severance and our leave and those kinds of things, but now thousands of federal workers are looking for new jobs.

Troy Swanson: What message should the general public or our listeners take from this dismissal? Or even those of us in education, what do we walk away with for students and families who depended on the programs, depended on the funding, depended on the Department of Ed to kind of be that umbrella that brought education together nationally. What is this message that we should take away?

Bradley Custer: The clear message to me is that the US Department of Education is no longer serving the people. The Education Department was already the smallest cabinet level federal agency by the number of staff. We only had about 4,100 people as of January. Then as a result of several rounds of people being fired and people leaving, we’re down to about half capacity. The cover story for all of this was supposedly about efficiency and saving money, but there’s no way the remaining people can do the jobs of all those people who were cut, which means that everybody, schools, parents, students, are just simply going to be getting less out of the Education Department. So instead of using the Education Department to serve America’s education system, the remaining staff are being used to attack students in schools.

Troy Swanson: And I don’t know if you’re still in touch with people who have been left behind or who are still working there but do you have any sense on what is morale like? What is the workload like? How are they holding up?

Bradley Custer: Morale is understandably bad. I know people who were not cut or forced out in that first round, who earlier this summer just quit because the working conditions under the new administration are so bad. For many people, they are stuck. They’re not actually able to do their work. For others, we’re learning about and paying attention to this new phenomenon, which is that many workers are being moved around within the Education Department. The agency is figuring out that it fired so many people who had critical jobs, that they’re scrambling to fill those roles with existing people, but you can imagine what that would be like as a worker. You were hired to do a job, maybe it was a job that you loved, and now you’re just being picked up and moved to do something else. For one thing, it’s not efficient and that worker may not be the best fit for that job, but it’s certainly also not a good experience for that worker either.

Troy Swanson: The irony of making a system that’s less efficient in the name of efficiency, which is probably the least of the ironies surrounding the Trump administration, but at least it’s noteworthy. In so many ways the Department of Education doesn’t actually make policy; it implements policy. How would you say that the Trump administration is using its authority to shape federal higher education policy or education policy overall?

Bradley Custer: The basic rule of federal government agencies is to enact the laws and implement the programs that Congress creates, but when Congress passes laws, it does not provide the detailed instructions that agencies need to spend those grant program dollars or implement the programs. That’s where federal agencies come in. They have administrative authority to create regulations, which are the rules for those programs, and this is how the presidential administration has influence over rulemaking. It creates regulations that align with its political ideologies.

And there’s a good example of this that I think librarians and really anybody working in the public sector should be following and interested in, and this goes back to that program that I described before, the public service loan forgiveness program. I mentioned before that Congress created the PSLF program and the basic eligibility requirement is that if you work at a 501(c)(3), you are eligible for that program while you are working there. There are very few exceptions in the law. Labor unions are one example, where if you work for a labor union, you’re not eligible for PSLF, but here is what the Trump administration is trying to do right now through its policymaking process. The Trump administration is trying to change the eligibility requirements that Congress established for the eligible employers. It is using this line that says that they are going to make employers ineligible if they engage in activities with a substantial illegal purpose. What in the world does that mean? Who knows? Nobody knows.

But here’s where we think they are going with this. We think the Department of Education is creating authority for itself to deem an employer ineligible if it doesn’t align with the current administration’s views. One of the areas where we see this most tangible is institutions that support undocumented immigrants. So imagine for a moment that a city still considers itself to be a sanctuary city, which means that it does not cooperate with federal immigration authorities. It is possible through this new rule that the Education Department is trying to create, that it will deem all employees of that city ineligible for public service loan forgiveness. And that is a scary thought. Of course, the people involved, the advocates who are at the table are pushing back very hard against this. And of course I also think it’s illegal. Congress did not create these strange eligibility requirements, but who knows what will happen? It’s something though that we should all be paying attention to.

Troy Swanson: If we extended that thinking, the state of Illinois has a sanctuary law that governs the whole state. So therefore anybody that works in a high school, grade school, college, community college in the state of Illinois could potentially be excluded from this. Is that how you would interpret it from their approach?

Bradley Custer: I think that’s entirely possible. And what makes it really scary is, we heard the President talking about the federal government shutdown. President Trump has been saying things like, “We are going after Democrat programs.” And so that’s why it makes me think it is not so much of a stretch to think that the Department of Education would try to punish any organization that it views as a quote-unquote Democrat program, like an organization that does anything to help undocumented immigrants.

Troy Swanson: And probably a list of other items as well.

If the administration, with this reduction in staff at the Education Department, what are the threats that you expect to see for students? I think especially coming from a community college, I think about the marginalized students that we see that are on the bubble, that they come to us because there is no other avenue, like we are the safety net of higher ed, as you well know. So, what is the threat that come to students as the Department is weakened or potentially entirely dismantled?

Bradley Custer: One of the plays from the Trump administration’s playbook that they have used quite a lot is withholding funding that Congress has approved to be spent. This is something that they’ve done across the federal government, but they’ve also done it a few times with education funding. Earlier this summer, billions of dollars were supposed to go to K-12 schools that the Department just decided it wasn’t going to give out. Similarly, there was money that was supposed to go to community colleges and other entities that do adult education that were blocked by the Trump administration. Through a series of lawsuits and public pressure, some of that money made it to where it was supposed to go, but I think this is something that the administration is going to continue to do to attack schools and vulnerable students, which is to withhold Congressionally-approved funding.

The other issue is that the Department is continuing to fire people. The Department announced that it was going to fire 466 more staff from the Education Department. From my understanding, the entire Office of Elementary and Secondary Education is now gone. Those are the folks who provided funding, grant funding all kinds of programs for K-12 schools. My understanding is also that the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services is also completely gone, and in the higher education sector, they fired a lot of the people who worked on grant programs for minority serving institutions and TRIO. TRIO is a critical student support program for middle school and high school students who are thinking about going to college and for students who are in college.

So between withholding federal funding for schools in higher education and firing the people who operate these grant programs, it’s clear that this administration is going to continue its attacks on vulnerable students in schools.

Troy Swanson: Yeah. My college is a TRIO college and even this year with the renewal, they held back money for a certain amount of time. I’m not directly involved with it, so I only have a rough understanding, forcing the use of hard budget money. The long term goal seems to be to crumble and weaken these programs and make administrators think about whether or not these should continue, so what you are saying is absolutely happening on the ground across the country. From your perspective, given that we have librarians as the main audience for this podcast, what should librarians, but also just all educators, be doing to stand up for the principles that Department supported, especially thinking about access and equity and student protections?

Bradley Custer: I live in Washington, DC where it seems like there’s always some kind of rally or protest. I regularly go to Capitol Hill to talk with Senators and members of Congress, but I realize that people everywhere else in the country don’t quite have that same experience. But it’s so important that people all over the country are organizing and speaking up. And that is so that there is not a single elected official from the local to state to federal who can say that they are unaware that their constituents are concerned and unhappy about these attacks on education. We need people to be speaking up.

What you just described happening where you are, I think, is excellent, which is that people on the ground, whether you’re working at a public library, at a school library, at a college library, that you are organizing and having conversations about, what is the plan? Something that’s, I think, really important. We’ve seen that this administration is not just attacking the values of education, but they’re attacking individual institutions, sometimes individual college presidents. So what people on college campuses need to do is have structured conversations with leadership, with their government relations staff, with their general counsels, and be prepared to answer the question, “If they come for us, are we going to stand up? Are we going to sue them? Are we going to protect and fight for our students and our employees?” And if the answer to any of those questions is no, then that is your agenda. Your agenda is to sway leadership in making sure that they do not simply give in to the Trump administration’s demands.

And if that is something that is uncomfortable for you, it certainly was for me. I had never gone to Capitol Hill. I didn’t used to talk to reporters. I didn’t use to go on podcasts. But I’ve learned that it’s important to speak up and one of the things that has been really helpful to me is getting involved in my labor union. If you have a labor union, now is the time to get involved. If you’re not a member, please join. In the federal government, they unrecognized the entire union at the Department of Veterans Affairs. They are coming for all of us, but I really think there is quite a lot of power in unions, and it’s a great space to organize, to learn how to be comfortable fighting for yourself, fighting for your fellow workers, and the people who you serve.

Troy Swanson: Well, I appreciate that and thank you for sharing all of this. I know it’s been a difficult time, and I know you’ve really become quite an advocate. I think it comes through in the information you’ve shared, your passion and some of the pain, if you don’t mind me saying that, to have survived this and moving on, but just to maybe try to end on a more positive note, which might be quite a stretch considering where we are, but if you think about the future of education, are there things that you see that make you hopeful?

Bradley Custer: I have two reasons to be hopeful, although they do come from sort of a dark place.

The first is that things could always be worse. I say that because there are some tangible examples of this. Had it not been for the two federal courts that blocked my firing, I would have been fired in June, about a month and a half before I actually was fired. And every day, every week, every month, of additional time that federal workers get to stay in their job and serve the American people is important. Another example is in the big government funding bill that the Republican-controlled Congress passed earlier this Spring, they passed some really terrible provisions that are going to make it very difficult for student loan borrowers to repay their loans, but there was also supposed to be some provisions that would’ve been devastating for, especially community colleges. The proposal was to change the eligibility requirements for part-time students in relation to the Pell Grant, but that as a result of a lot of advocacy was taken out. And so those are two examples of things are bad but they could have been worse if not for people speaking up. So that gives me some hope.

The other area of hope, again it’s a bit dark, but I believe that no aspect of American life is going to be unscathed by this administration. Whether you are someone who has witnessed a violent kidnapping of someone by federal immigration enforcement, whether you are someone who is facing down huge jumps in your healthcare premiums, whether you’re a small business owner who is feeling the pressure of Trump’s tariff wars ,if you are a student loan borrower who is seeing unaffordable monthly loan payments, all people are going to experience the pain of this administration. And as a result, my hope is that the natural outcome of that will be increased engagement with our democracy, meaning that they will speak up, that they will vote in every election that’s upcoming, and they will vote for the people who are not giving tax breaks to billionaires in exchange for cutting all of these important things that we need, like education. So I do think there is a way out of this, but now is the time for all Americans to make their voices heard.

Troy Swanson: Well, Bradley, I want to thank you for your honesty and thank you for sharing your experience. I think this is really important, and I think hearing your strong voice, I hope we send this out into the world and people do follow through and that I think if we are to rejuvenate our democracy, it is from conversations like this. So thank you for your time and thank you for sharing your experience and expertise.

Bradley Custer: Thanks, Troy.