Washington — The Education Department’s chief financial officer, Lawrence A. Warder, is getting a little head-start on the rush of Bush-administration appointees returning home to Texas.

With a little more than three months remaining in the administration’s term, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced today that Mr. Warder would leave the department on Friday. Mr. Warder has served since July 2006 as the department’s chief financial officer and since June 2007 as acting chief operating officer of its division of Federal Student Aid.

Mr. Warder had a 36-year career in the private sector, most of that with Deloitte Consulting. He took charge of the Education Department’s student-aid unit after the resignation of Theresa S. Shaw during a period of heavy criticism led by the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, of the financial links between lenders and administrators at colleges who recommended those lenders to their students.

Ms. Shaw began serving this past August as chief operating officer at the Educational Credit Management Corporation, which has a contract to handle electronic-records management for the student-loan unit she previously headed at the Education Department.

In a letter today to the staff of the student-aid division, Mr. Warder thanked his colleagues for helping the department “to successfully navigate a number of challenging situations,” including the economic troubles facing student-loan companies and the use by lenders of a loophole in federal law to extract an estimated $1.2-billion in disputed government subsidies.

James F. Manning, a career federal employee serving as deputy chief operating officer of Federal Student Aid, will become the new acting chief operating officer, Ms. Spellings announced. Thomas P. Skelly, director of budget service, will assume the authority of the position of the department’s chief financial officer, and Danny A. Harris, deputy chief financial officer, will serve as chief information officer, Ms. Spellings said. —Paul Basken