The programs that took the biggest blows include student loans, the research arm that runs the ‘Nation’s Report Card’ and civil rights.

By Linda Jacobson, Mark Keierleber, Greg Toppo & Amanda Geduld

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

A purge of U.S. Department of Education staff Tuesday night left deep cuts to programs long critical to its mission, from investigating student discrimination complaints to measuring academic performance.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the elimination of over 1,300 employees, meaning that, along with buyouts and early retirements, the department is roughly half the size it was when President Donald Trump took office just eight weeks ago.

“Everyone’s crushed,” said Denise Joseph, a management and program analyst in the Office of Postsecondary Education. She was put on leave in January and received her final termination notice Tuesday. “I can’t do the work that I really want to do, that was making a difference in my community and the nation.”

McMahon said the cuts and reorganization are necessary to “succeed in this final mission” to sunset the agency.

The programs that took the biggest blows include its much-criticized Federal Student Aid office, the research and statistics arm that runs the test known as “the Nation’s Report Card” and its Office for Civil Rights.

The move fell short of Trump’s promise to shutter a department he dismissed as “a con job,” leaving relatively intact deeply funded programs he’d need Congress to eliminate, like aid for low-income students and those with disabilities. But there was no doubt the move left the department hobbled in a way many Republicans have longed for since its doors first opened in 1980.

“The most important function of the staff in the civil rights office is to monitor and investigate issues of discrimination that kids and families experience at the local level,” said Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of education and political science at Teachers College, Columbia University.“Now, it’s highly likely that any cry against injustice … sits in an unchecked inbox. And the cumulative effects of that are frightening.”

Much of the reaction Wednesday fell along party lines. For many conservatives, the department is a byzantine bureaucracy that has proved difficult to tame. 

David Cleary, a former Republican education staffer for the Senate and now a principal with The Group, a Washington lobbying firm, said the department doesn’t need hundreds of staff members to distribute formula funding programs like Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

“They’re delightful and lovely and very nice people, but do they really add value to the implementation of IDEA at the state level?” he asked. “People do process and procedure because of history and habit.”

He predicted legislators would mostly focus on whether the department has enough people to effectively run the programs authorized by Congress.

“The Republican complaint for 40 years,” he said, “has been, ‘It’s a formula grant; just send the money out the door. Why do you need this massive bureaucracy to come up with new rules, new procedures, new requirements, new mandates, new interpretations?’”

‘Double talk’

The large-scale reductions are part of Trump’s across-the-board effort to downsize the government. Every agency is expected to submit plans for reducing staff by March 13. The layoffs in education, while less dramatic than those at larger agencies like the Veterans Administration and the Social Security Administration, received outsize attention due to Trump’s promise to abolish the 45-year-old agency.

On Wednesday, the department temporarily closed its Washington, D.C. and regional offices in part to give employees a day to process the cuts, but also as a precaution. 

“We expect protests,” spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said Tuesday night. “It’s just better and more considerate of staff to keep the department closed.”

While lawsuits are inevitable, Tuesday’s actions may have made it difficult for the department to defend against them: Cuts included 38 staff members in the general counsel’s office.

“The amount of double talk that’s coming out of the administration is astonishing,” said Johnathan Smith, chief of staff at the National Center for Youth Law and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice during the Biden administration. 

For example, the elimination of at least 243 OCR employees comes days after the office announced a comprehensive investigation into the District of Columbia Public Schools for having over 10,000 complaints from parents of children with disabilities. Officials said they also planned to prioritize a backlog of antisemitism complaints and restart other civil rights investigations that were temporarily on hold. 

Further, after canceling an upcoming national test for 17-year-olds — last administered in 2012 — the department said it was committed to the core math and reading tests that make up the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But the sweeping cuts to the National Center for Education Statistics and the Institute for Education Sciences leave the future of the Nation’s Report Card unclear. 

For many observers, the cuts also call into question Trump’s nomination of well-respected educators to key positions, including Penny Schwinn, former Tennessee education chief, as deputy secretary, and Kristen Baesler, North Dakota superintendent, as assistant secretary in charge of K-12 education. 

“You would think that if those people are going to come in, they would have been given some assurance that they’re going to have something to do,” said Charles Barone, a former Democratic House staffer and now director of the Center for Innovation at the National Parents Union, an advocacy organization. 

Civil rights

The layoffs spread far outside Washington, shuttering seven of the 12 regional OCR offices, where investigators talk to families and school officials at the center of discrimination complaints. 

“I am sick about these staff losses,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR during both the Obama and Biden administrations. She called Tuesday her “worst day.”

“OCR has 14,000 to 15,000 cases in investigation right now,” she said. “Any notion that the Office for Civil Rights does not need seven of its 12 regional offices to do the work Congress charged [it] to do is pure nonsense.”

One OCR employee who received a reduction-in-force email told The 74 that some of the terminated employees had decades of experience at the department despite federal personnel rules that place recent hires at the front of the line for layoffs. 

“If you’re going to RIF people, people with seniority that have been here 30 years should not be on this list,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from the administration. “This is totally illegal.” 

Ironically, among the eliminations to the general counsel’s office were attorneys who provide advice on how to downsize the department in “a legally compliant way,” said one laid-off attorney who spoke on the condition of anonymity for the same reason. 

“In addition to making the department more vulnerable to litigation,” the attorney said, gutting the general counsel’s office could hinder efforts to ensure federal programs, including those for special education services, are “implemented in a fair, transparent, legally supportable manner.” 

‘The Nation’s Report Card’ 

Over 100 positions were sliced from IES, which collects data from early childhood to higher education and evaluates programs intended to improve student performance. But the cuts leave experts wondering who will administer and analyze its most important prize: the NAEP test. 

Harvard University assessment expert Andrew Ho is a former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the test. He knows many of the NCES staff members who were cut and called them “essential to NAEP operations.” When students still haven’t recovered from pandemic learning loss, he argues that it’s critical not to undercut the program.

“Congress, the department, and the NAEP board must act quickly and boldly to restore core assessment expertise,” he said. “Or I can’t see why any state governor, let alone parents of kids, would trust NAEP results.” 

K-12 education

Tuesday’s action means that once North Dakota’s Baesler is confirmed as assistant secretary, she’ll be largely on her own in the office that oversees K-12 education. Forty-nine union employees, including its “front office,” were cut from the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees Title I and runs programs to improve K-12 learning. 

Keith McNamara, a data governance specialist who was on the termination list, and his colleagues, monitored and audited data for K-12 school grant programs to ensure accuracy and states’ compliance with rules on spending federal funds. 

“Our office was essentially trying to connect the dots” across the office “to make sure that things were more efficient than they would have been otherwise,” he said. “We made sure that the data was accurate, complete, reliable and timely. I don’t know who’s going to be doing that anymore.” 

Cleary, the former Republican staffer, suggested the task is not as daunting as some make it out to be. 

“If states come in and say, ‘Hey I want a waiver for X,Y or Z, do you need 30 people to do that, or is it one policy person and a lawyer?” 

Student aid

The office of Federal Student Aid — the largest provider of student financial aid in the nation, which processes more than 17.6 million applications each year — was hardest hit, losing at least 326 of its approximately 1,400 employees. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency recommends replacing many of those staffers with artificial intelligence, according to The New York Times.

The office just recently emerged from a challenging year, following a botched rollout of the new FAFSA form, which was meant to simplify the historically complicated application for federal student aid. The process was marred by embarrassing delays and technical glitches, particularly for students whose parents are undocumented and don’t have Social Security numbers.

“You can’t cut that many people from the department and not expect that services will decline,” said Katharine Meyer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center of Education Policy. “When you have fewer people in that office, people are going to get slower services. They may not get their questions answered at all.”

Meyer said last year’s debacle demonstrated that even when the office is fully staffed, it can be incredibly challenging to get a nuanced response — or any response— to complicated questions. She noted that springtime, when high school seniors start to get acceptance letters, is typically when large volumes of calls begin pouring in.

”This is go time,” she said, “and it’s pretty much the worst time you can imagine to be understaffed to address those questions.”

‘Mix of emotions’

In a letter Tuesday night to the U.S. Department of Education’s remaining staff, McMahon acknowledged the emotional impact of eliminating hundreds of employees. 

“I understand that seeing valued colleagues and friends depart is never easy,” she wrote in an email shared with The 74. “These changes can bring a mix of emotions — grief for those we will miss, uncertainty about the future and concern for the work that lies ahead.”

One career employee who took early retirement said the environment at the department has been “oppressive,” and predicted further defections among those still left standing after Tuesday’s mass firing.

“They’re just going for blood,” said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing benefits. “Everybody is looking.”