Half a century ago, hundreds of thousands of children with disabilities nationwide either had to attend costly private schools or forgo education altogether. Students with disabilities who were in school were isolated from their peers for most of the school day. And the prospects for a parent securing disability services for their child depended heavily on the state where they lived.
But in 1975, Congress mandated that all students with disabilities nationwide receive a “free and appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment” under the law now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Those federal rights haven’t changed. But President Donald Trump’s administration in recent months has plunged the federal office tasked with carrying out those policies into an unprecedented period of turmoil and uncertainty, unsettling many current and former staffers, as well as district leaders and advocates for children with disabilities nationwide.
“Losing the expertise that exists in the Department of Education creates a lot of uncertainty, and it’s scary for us in the field,” said Melissa Taylor, executive director of the Illinois Alliance of Administrators of Special Education. “I know that it’s scary for our families.”
Trump’s announcement on March 21 that special education services would move to the Department of Health and Human Services—later confirmed by the agency’s secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on X—kicked the turmoil into higher gear. But it’s become even more complicated as that agency faces a significant reduction in force that calls into question whether it will have the capacity to take on an entirely new responsibility.
Legal experts say Trump’s administration can’t move agency offices without congressional approval, but the administration has repeatedly overstepped its executive authority early into the president’s second term.
Current Education Department staffers who work on special education still don’t know whether they’ll keep their jobs or relinquish their duties to HHS employees.
Long-serving former staffers believe the changes could reduce federal enforcement of special education law and hamper the federal government’s ability to support students with disabilities.
“Left to their own devices, states historically did not do what was right for kids with disabilities,” said Larry Wexler, who served as a division director in the department’s office of special education programs from 2006 until late last year. “My fear is, with a diminished emphasis on the requirements, that that will happen again.”
Trump hasn’t specified whether current special education staffers will move or be replaced
The Trump administration has offered few details about what the move would look like. In recent days, administration officials have acknowledged that it would take approval from Congress to move any of the statutorily mandated offices to new departments.
Still, the move had been telegraphed ahead of Trump’s seemingly unprompted announcement during an unrelated Oval Office appearance.
Project 2025, the conservative policy document authored by several of Trump’s most influential advisers, mentions moving special education to HHS, though it doesn’t spell out how. Bills filed over the last two years seeking to dismantle the Education Department have proposed the move as well.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon floated it as a possibility during her February confirmation hearing. She noted that HHS’ predecessor agency—the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—handled the program before the Education Department was formed in 1980.
The courts may also shape what happens next. Lawsuits challenging executive branch efforts to eliminate the Education Department, and aiming to reverse the termination of civil rights lawyers, have only begun to play out.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
Advocates worry about stigmatizing special education as a ‘medical’ concern
Special education has been a Department of Education responsibility since the agency started under President Jimmy Carter in 1980. During his 1976 presidential campaign Carter mentioned “the educational rights of the handicapped” as one of the top priorities of an education agency.
In recent decades, the Education Department’s office of special education programs has employed roughly 100 people across two divisions.
From 2011 until last year, Gregg Corr oversaw the division that handles federal special education grant funding for states. Corr now worries that services for students with disabilities could end up isolated within HHS, especially as that agency—which is much larger than the Education Department—also weathers significant staffing cuts.
Current special education staffers are concerned that the federal government will pull back from enforcement and oversight, and serve only as a “grant-making organization,” said Corr, who has been in touch with former colleagues.
The disability community is accustomed to their needs being pigeonholed as “strictly a medical” issue, said Melissa Taylor, who retired last year after 30 years as a public school special education teacher and administrator in Illinois. Educators are best positioned to administer those programs in ways that help meet students’ complex needs, she said.
“The way that things play out in a school system are very different than the way they might play out in a hospital, or from a medical lens,” Taylor said.
Taylor and other special education advocates have said they remain confused about the administration’s vision for improving special education.
McMahon said during her confirmation hearing that she and the president aren’t proposing cuts to IDEA funding. Project 2025 calls for converting some IDEA funds to vouchers that can be spent on private education options.
Three Democratic House lawmakers introduced a bill on March 26 that would prohibit the use of federal funds to “eliminate, consolidate, or restructure” any Department of Education office related to special education.
Federal workers help ensure states are following the law
The OSEP division Corr oversaw guided states’ efforts to ensure districts were adequately providing disability services for all students who require them. Staffers issue annual reports assessing states’ efforts and highlighting areas for improvement, and field calls from state officials and parents to help them navigate the complexities of special education policy.
Those tasks are formidable, Corr said, especially as the number and percentage of America’s children receiving special education services have grown over the last few decades. There has never been a year when the federal government deemed every state fully in compliance with special education law.
Many states have only a handful of personnel working exclusively on special education. Their investments in oversight of special education tend to fluctuate as budgets wax and wane.
In recent years, Corr said, some state efforts to support special education came under political scrutiny over diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—even before the second Trump administration began. Political pressure around those issues made it harder for some states to hire new staff or do meaningful work on special education, Corr said.
OSEP was spared from the massive reduction in force the Education Department announced in mid-March that will leave the agency with about half its staff. But the office’s ranks have still dwindled.
Since Trump took office January, four long-serving OSEP staffers were among dozens of Education Department employees placed on administrative leave because they attended an agency DEI training event in 2019—during Trump’s first administration.
Another handful of more recently hired OSEP employees were let go as part of the administration’s dismissal of tens of thousands of federal probationary employees across the federal government, then placed on administrative leave after a federal judge ordered the reinstatement of those workers.
Sixteen employees from the office of special education and rehabilitative services, the umbrella office that OSEP is nested within, were on a widely circulated list of staffers laid off as part of the Education Department’s massive reduction in force in mid-March. Only one person now remains in that umbrella office.
And both OSEP division directors—Corr and Wexler—retired late last year after more than a decade each in their roles and a combined 70 years of service in the department.
Some compliance monitoring efforts that got underway in late 2024 have likely slowed down as a result of the reduced capacity, Corr said. The team’s core priority is to submit the first round of responses to states’ annual reports in April.
“This is a very committed staff,” Corr said. “People have taken on additional work in order to get things done.”
Moving IDEA oversight to HHS could scramble collaborative efforts to supply money and support
Still, the staff cuts could lead remaining employees to be “less likely to take risks in identifying issues” with states’ special education activities, Corr said.
All of the attorneys in the department’s office of general counsel who regularly provide legal guidance to OSEP staffers were dismissed, he said.
Meanwhile, the administration dismissed 40 percent of staff at the department’s office of civil rights, which investigates school districts when parents allege their students aren’t receiving mandatory services. Seven of OCR’s 12 regional offices have closed altogether.
Advocates say that means less manpower to investigate and hold accountable schools 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. Some stretched back as far as 2016.
Of the at least 85 investigations the Education Department has opened during Trump’s second presidency so far, only one—of the District of Columbia’s public school system—pertains to services for students with disabilities, according to Education Week’s investigations tracker.
JD Hsin, a professor of law for the University of Alabama who previously worked in OCR, described the diminishing of OSEP and OCR as kicking out two legs of a three-legged stool.
“I really worry that the capacity to enforce the laws that protect kids with disabilities rights in school has been seriously eroded,” Hsin said. “I just don’t know how one digs out of the backlog that this office, truth be told, inherited over the past 10-plus years of many complaints rolling in. But I especially don’t know how you do it when you cut your staff in half and when you have an increasing caseload with all these other issues that are percolating to the office.”
Those attorneys didn’t only investigate discrimination complaints. During his tenure at OSEP, Wexler helped spearhead a first-of-its-kind guidance document outlining best practices for seclusion and restraint, and he leaned on the expertise of OCR’s civil rights attorneys.
“Working closely with them made it better because they looked at the world through a different lens than I did,” Wexler said. “There’s a real danger that that kind of collaboration will be lost.”
During his time at the department, Wexler said, OSEP helped fund research that led to the now-ubiquitous closed-captioning service; launched a resource center for the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports system that thousands of schools use; and supplied funding for countless doctoral students whose research has helped improve evidence-based practices in special education.
“OSEP has done some amazing, amazing things. Can it still do amazing things potentially? Sure,” Wexler said. “But it will be lost in an office in a much, much larger organization.”
