Many face higher student loan payments after Trump orders plan to dismantle the Education Department

President Donald Trump says the Small Business Administration will now handle the Education Department's $1.6 trillion college student loan portfolio.

The SBA said Friday that it is cutting its staff by 43%.

Millions of people are paying college loans, and they have a lot of questions about their payments.

Many were already seeing their payments jump.

"I mean, shocking. You know, it's crazy to see. It doubled overnight," Dominic Chaklos, who is paying student loans, said.

He couldn't believe when his college loan payment jumped from $1,200 a month to over $2,800.

He says he's been on an income-based payment plan for years.

"We've been told by the Department of Education that we can't process any income based repayment recertifications or new applications. And because of that, you automatically just get placed into what they call your standard repayment, which for me was more than double," says Chaklos.

Some of that was due to a court ruling, and now there is last week's announcement by Trump that the Department of Education will no longer handle college loans.

"I've decided that the SBA, the Small Business Administration, headed by Kelly Loeffler, a terrific person, will handle all of the student loan portfolio," said President Trump from the Oval Office.

Experts say this means a lot of uncertainty for borrowers.

"We've had this announcement to the Secretary of the Department of Education to go about changing some of its functions, but we don't yet know how any of those things are going to be carried out. What time frame they're going to be on or what that's going to look like for borrowers," said Kate Wood, who is a lending expert at NerdWallet.

Trump signed an executive order Thursday calling for the dismantling of the U.S. Education Department, advancing a campaign promise to take apart an agency that's been a longtime target of conservatives.

Wood says over the past few years, as administrations change, these programs change. There are also new ones, so it's difficult to say where all of this is headed.

"Log on to your studentaid.gov account if you have federal student loans and download or screenshot all of your information. If anything in the future does change with that website or with servicing, anything like that. If a servicer or another entity is telling you something and you're not sure that it's right, you'll have that record to look back on," said Wood.

Wood says, even with the executive order and the new announcements, not much has actually changed as of this moment.

She says you should keep all your contact information current to make sure you get alerted if anyone reaches out about your loan payments.