Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify comments about the office for civil rights.
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The seismic dismissal of employees at the U.S. Department of Education this week represents a “first step” toward abolishing the federal agency, Education Secretary Linda McMahon confirmed shortly after reduction-in-force notices went out to hundreds of employees Tuesday evening.
In the meantime, the slashes further diminish the department’s capacity to carry out its key functions of funding and disseminating research, enforcing the nation’s school accountability laws, investigating discrimination claims and bringing schools into compliance with anti-discrimination statutes, and more.
The department will shrink to just about 2,200 employees by March 21—just over half its size when President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, following his repeated campaign promises to eliminate the federal agency.
Some of the heaviest cuts will hit the department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences—which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress and statistics-gathering and dissemination through the National Center for Education Statistics. The agency’s anti-discrimination enforcement arm, the office for civil rights, is another division sustaining heavy cuts. That office existed even before the Education Department was carved into its own agency 45 years ago and was key to desegregating schools.
“I believe this is just an illegal overreach over congressional action,” said Sheria Smith, the president of the union that represents Education Department staff and a laid-off staff member. “This administration, with these RIF notices, has impacted every last office in the U.S. Department of Education, not one spared.”
The firings in some cases wipe out entire divisions, employees familiar with the cuts said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
“The president’s mandate as directed to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we’ll have to work with Congress to get that accomplished,” McMahon said in a Fox News interview Tuesday night. “But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat.”
Since Trump took office, the department has been an early target for major reductions—with staff already put on leave or dismissed, and scores of contracts and grants touching the department’s key research, data collection, teacher-prep, and technical assistance functions swiftly terminated.
McMahon said in the Fox interview that the department aimed to keep “the right people, the good people” to make sure the department is meeting its congressional mandates. But education advocates worry that the cuts will affect central functions anyway.
“This is using a chainsaw, if you will, to tear up the department, instead of a clear scalpel that’s needed,” said Amy Loyd, the CEO for All4Ed, an organization that advocates for students of color and students from low-income families, and a former department official. “Can the agency improve? Absolutely. Are there ways to strengthen and improve efficiency? That’s true of any organization. That’s absolutely true of the department. Is this approach to kind of recklessly fire half of the staff going to improve efficiency? No, it’s going to undermine effectiveness and efficiency and set us back as a nation, potentially for decades.”
See below for details on the different effects of the mass dismissals.
Where the cuts hit hardest
By Brooke Schultz, Mark Lieberman, and Matthew Stone
While the department is dismissing employees from virtually all of its approximately 20 divisions, some are harder hit than others, according to an Education Week analysis of documents detailing the cuts.
More than 40 percent of the office for civil rights will be dismissed. The office, which investigates claims of discrimination at the nation’s schools and colleges, had 562 staffers in 2023, making it the department’s second largest division, according to budget documents. At least 243 of its employees will no longer have jobs; that figure doesn’t include non-union employees and those who took the earlier buyout, deferred resignation, and early retirement offers.
Another hard-hit division is the Institute of Education Sciences, which will lose at least 62 percent of its staff, going from 167 employees in 2023 to 62 at most. A source familiar with IES cuts said the dismissals essentially hollow out the National Center for Education Statistics, one of four centers within IES and the one that handles key data collections and the number-crunching behind the “Nation’s Report Card” exam.
The Trump administration could use its decimation of the IES ranks to argue that Congress should substantially cut its annual investment of $800 million for that organization, said Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee on Education Funding, during a school funding briefing on Capitol Hill Wednesday afternoon. “I think that all the IES funding is in great jeopardy,” she said.
The department’s largest division, the Federal Student Aid office, will see at least 23 percent of its staff cut. It had 1,371 full-time equivalent employees in 2023.
The office of elementary and secondary education—the primary office supporting K-12 districts—is losing at least 17 percent of its staff, which numbered 282 in 2023.
The career, technical, and adult education office will see at least nine employees lose their jobs from a staff of 67 in 2023.
And the office that oversees state compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the office of special education and rehabilitative services, will lose a smaller portion of its staff—at least 16 from a staff of 185 in 2023.
One department employee, who was not part of Tuesday’s firings, said agency leadership wasn’t pushing back on any mandate coming down from the Trump administration.
“Whatever comes down from [the Office of Personnel Management] or DOGE or whomever, it’s just like, ‘Yep, yep. We’re doing that,’” the employee said.
Another employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, has been on administrative leave for six weeks, and has received almost no communication about reinstatement. The employee was not included in Tuesday’s reduction in force, so the state of limbo continues.
“We’re just wasting taxpayer funds with me being at home,” the employee said, adding later, “It’s the not knowing. I have no process for coming back. It’s the uncertainty that is adding to the heaviness and just the stress of it all. It just sucks.”
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Civil rights enforcement
By Brooke Schultz
The civil rights office that was more than 560 employees and 12 regional offices strong during President Joe Biden’s administration shrank overnight by almost half, with six regional locations shuttering completely, according to sources familiar with those layoffs and emails reviewed by Education Week.
The office for civil rights existed before the Education Department became its own agency in 1980, operating within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, as a centerpiece to desegregating schools in the 1960s, said Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina who specializes in constitutional law and public education. A vast majority of schools were ultimately desegregated due to voluntary agreements with OCR, he said.
Complaints have grown exponentially in recent years, with the office resolving 16,005 and receiving 22,687 in 2024, according to department data. The number of new complaints represented an 18 percent increase over the previous fiscal year, when it received 19,201, a record at the time, according to the office’s latest annual report. Former President Joe Biden’s administration sought to expand the office to address the need.
After Trump’s inauguration, though, most of the work came to a halt. Mediations were canceled. No communication was permitted outside the department. Complaints continued to flow in, but few cases not aligned with Trump’s executive orders around race, gender, and antisemitism were opened.
Now, with a staff of just around 300—and closed regional offices in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco—casework will only grow for the attorneys left.
“If the administration is going to make good on its ‘dear colleague’ letters, given the amount of staff they’ve got left over, that might be the only thing that they do,” Black said, referring to directives from the department telling schools to abide by the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws or risk losing funds.
“If you’re a parent whose child is not receiving special education accommodations, you’re out of luck. Those folks are going to be busy harassing Columbia [University]. If you’ve got a daughter or a son or whoever you know that’s a victim of sexual assault or persistent sexual harassment, you can go online and file your little complaint. But is there going to be somebody on the other end with time to do that?”
Already, the staff has been bogged down, said Michael Pillera, a senior civil rights attorney at OCR who had previously given notice that he would leave at the end of this week, apart from any buyout offers and the reduction in force. They were already juggling caseloads that grew after their ranks shrank following each buyout offer and each time someone was placed on leave.
There have been additional hurdles to complete cases, Pillera said, and now the cuts are making it even harder for work to move forward at all.
The department’s regional offices exist so attorneys can do on-site investigations, rather than parachute in from Washington, allowing attorneys to measure bathrooms and playgrounds for accessibility, check softball and baseball fields for equal athletic opportunity, visit the rooms students were reportedly secluded in, and see how students were restrained, Pillera said.
All of those matters require in-person investigation, but now the office lacks many of its regional locations that allowed its staff to do them, Pillera said.
“I fear many parents and students are going to go without access to education, go without responses from OCR at all,” he said.
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Students with disabilities
By Mark Lieberman
The agency appears to have laid off at least 16 workers in its office of special education and rehabilitation services. That division includes a smaller office of special education programs, which distributes grants for special education services and monitors state compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Special education experts remained unsure Wednesday afternoon how those cuts would affect services for students with disabilities. But the effects of OCR’s cuts were clearer. According to Meghan Burke, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt University, it means parents of children with disabilities will have a harder time holding their schools accountable for failing to provide legally mandated services.
Of the more than 12,000 OCR complaints pending in the days before Trump took office, more than 5,800—almost half—had to do with complaints of disability-based discrimination.
“In an already unbalanced playing field, we’ve completely tilted the playing field against parents and students,” Burke said.
Trump, McMahon, and other prominent Republicans have repeatedly vowed to offload the federal government’s education responsibilities to the states. McMahon also suggested during her confirmation hearing that responsibility for IDEA programs could transition to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—repeating a line from Project 2025, the widely circulated conservative policy document.
But when it comes to special education, states themselves are struggling—30 states and the District of Columbia were out of compliance with federal disability law, the office of special education programs reported last June.
Last year was hardly an anomaly, according to Burke. “We’ve never had a year where we thought all 50 states were doing great for IDEA, which would suggest that maybe we don’t need federal monitoring,” Burke said. “... You can’t ask somebody who’s already struggling to then give advice to somebody about how to do those things.”
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Research and data collection
By Sarah Schwartz and Mark Lieberman
Cuts swept away big chunks of the Institute of Education Sciences—including almost the entire staff of the National Center for Education Research and the National Center for Education Statistics.
The elimination of much of the Education Department’s research arm has caused “a huge, huge, huge amount of concern and uncertainty,” said Dan Goldhaber, the director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research.
“The concern is related to both the data that look like they are no longer going to be collected, and the loss of capacity to do data analysis,” Goldhaber said. For example, he said, NCES maintains the Common Core of Data, a collection of information on public elementary and secondary schools that undergirds an “enormous” amount of research in K-12 education.
The Trump administration has repeatedly said that it won’t interrupt one of NCES’ core functions—the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test given periodically to U.S. students known as the Nation’s Report Card.
But NAEP relies on CCD data to draw a sample of students, said Goldhaber. If CCD collection is affected by these staff reductions, he said, “all of the discussion about NAEP not being touched is probably not right.”
IES also funds research focused on improving teaching and learning, doing “incredibly important work,” said Nancy Jordan, a professor of learning sciences at the University of Delaware.
“I think it would be very hard to have a funding agency without a well-staffed set of program officers to help guide the process,” Jordan said.
A synthesis of IES-supported research in math from 2002-2013, co-authored by Jordan, found more than two dozen different contributions to math teaching and learning across grades K-12 from studies the agency funded, including identifying teaching methods that improve students’ skills in notoriously difficult math areas like fractions and word-problem solving.
Research propelled by the agency has transformed literacy instruction, too, said Bethany Rittle-Johnson, a professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, and a co-author of the synthesis paper.
“The science of reading—which has gotten a lot of people’s attention—[much of] that work has been funded by IES and shows the critical role that research plays in helping our kids learn,” she said.
IES was established in 2002, with the goal of fostering “scientifically based” research that could produce scalable insights into improving schools.
“They created it with the intention of raising the level of quality in education research,” said Devin Kearns, a professor in early literacy at North Carolina State University. “There is no question that they have accomplished that goal.”
IES holds rigorous standards and has encouraged the use of randomized controlled trials in education research—“really strong, gold-standard methodology,” said Jordan.
It’s unclear how the loss of program staff will affect ongoing grants.
“We have no idea” what will happen to current research, said Rittle-Johnson, who is advising a junior faculty member on an IES-funded project.
State education agencies are responsible each year for submitting a wide range of education data to IES, which aggregates and analyzes the numbers to highlight trends from state to state.
In Maryland, those collections will continue regardless of IES cuts, said Richard Kincaid, the director of career and technical education for the Maryland education department, at the Hill briefing.
“We’re going to have to buckle down and get really good at being focused at the work that we’re doing,” Kincaid said. “We, too, are going to have to become incredibly efficient at delivery of services, and making sure that even if our progress isn’t tracked at a national level, we’re tracking it as a state.”
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Rural school funding
By Mark Lieberman
NCES uses Census data to assign each of the nation’s 13,000 school districts to one of four categories: city, suburban, town, or rural. The department then uses those designations to help determine district-by-district allocations for funding programs approved by Congress.
Without up-to-date designations, schools in rural communities that are classified another way could lose out on funding streams meant to help them specifically stay financially afloat, said Devon Brenner, president of the National Rural Education Association and a professor of rural education at Mississippi State University. Roughly 20 percent of America’s K-12 students attend school in rural districts, which tend to have smaller tax bases and steeper costs for services like transportation.
One such funding stream is the Rural Education Achievement Program.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed in 1965 and reauthorized most recently in 2015 as the Every Student Succeeds Act, includes several provisions that prohibit the government from overlooking rural schools when making funding decisions, Brenner said.
“If everything becomes competitive, sometimes the large and metropolitan schools have more capacity to apply for things or leverage those resources” than their rural counterparts do, Brenner said.
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Native American students
By Mark Lieberman
The federal government has trust agreements with hundreds of Native American tribes nationwide to ensure that, in exchange for ceding their land, those groups can meaningfully access education and health care. The Bureau of Indian Education under the Interior Department is the main agency overseeing the education piece of those agreements, but the Education Department also plays a role.
Since 2005, NCES under the Education Department has been conducting the ongoing National Indian Education Study, which tracks Native students’ exam scores and their exposure to instruction on Native history, language, and culture.
The program manager of that study was among the department employees laid off, according to Susan Faircloth, an education researcher and member of the Coharie tribe who serves as chair of the study’s technical review panel.
“If we’re not able to have a sense of how well our students are doing academically, and the extent to which they have that exposure to Native language culture history, we’re not able to do our due diligence in terms of serving that particular population,” Faircloth said.
Cuts affecting special education will hit particularly hard in Native communities as well, Faircloth said. Roughly 19 percent of students nationwide who are identified as American Indian and Alaska Native are eligible for special education services—a larger percentage than for any other racial category, compared with roughly 15 percent of the overall K-12 student population.
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English learners
By Ileana Najarro
Most—if not all—of the Education Department’s office of English language acquisition, known as OELA, was eliminated in Tuesday’s reduction in force.
The downsizing of the office, which holds states and local districts accountable for supporting English learners and oversees professional development grants for educators working with English learners, compounds the Trump administration’s attempts to diminish protections for immigrant students.
The president has also signed an executive order making English the official language—which could create long-term challenges to meeting multilingual students’ needs. Trump also lifted a ban that, for more than a decade, prohibited immigration arrests on school property.
OELA had 16 employees in 2023, according to data from the Education Department. Twelve union positions were cut in the reduction in force.
“I don’t know if OELA still exists,” said a department employee who asked not to be named.
This office is charged with ensuring that states abide by Lau v. Nichols, the 1974 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing English learners the right to English language instruction. It also recently started overseeing distribution of Title III grants to states for supplemental services for English learners.
To help schools and states improve instruction for the nation’s 5.3 million English learners, OELA hosts webinars, publishes playbooks, and offers technical assistance, said Montserrat Garibay, the office’s most recent former director under Biden.
While many Education Department employees received emails telling them they were part of the massive reduction in force, others received “moving forward” emails that offered no clarity on next steps and whether they would remain in their current roles, the employee told Education Week.
Garibay said any downsizing of OELA’s staff would be “detrimental to the types of resources and support that educators are receiving at this moment.”
