The prolonged government shutdown is helping the Trump administration advance its goal of closing the Education Department – a longtime conservative aim that congressional Republicans have failed to act on.
The agency had already reduced its staff by half earlier this year. Now, blaming the shutdown, the Education Department is trying to lay off an additional 465 people, cutting deeply into multiple offices. That includes federal officials who oversee special education programs and another round of slashing at the Office for Civil Rights.
Some parts of the agency would be nearly hollowed out.
“There’s something opportunistic about what we’re watching right now,” said Jim Blew, who served in a senior position at the Education Department during the first Trump administration. “These guys have very clear goals. When you give them an opportunity to achieve them, they go full bore.”
These staff reductions were temporarily frozen by a federal judge Wednesday. But they follow a series of moves that have steadily eroded the agency. This year a string of grant programs have been eliminated, hobbled or delayed. Contracts have been canceled. And officials have begun work to move pieces of the agency elsewhere in what could be a template to transfer out other parts of the department.
President Donald Trump has vowed to close the department, though top officials including Education Secretary Linda McMahon acknowledge that congressional action is required to do so. Lawmakers have taken virtually no steps toward this, partly because the legislation would require Democratic support to reach the required 60-vote threshold in the Senate.
Following deep staff reductions in the spring, critics argued – in court and elsewhere – that the Education Department was not capable of carrying out its statutory functions with such a small staff. The new round of layoffs only deepened those concerns and raised questions about whether the Trump administration was attempting a de facto shuttering of the agency without congressional action.
In a statement on X, McMahon suggested the two-plus-week government shutdown had forced her to reconsider what federal responsibilities “are truly critical for the American people.”
“Two weeks in, millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid, and schools are operating as normal,” she posted. “It confirms what the President has said: The federal Department of Education is unnecessary.”
If allowed to go into effect, the layoffs would decimate the Office for Civil Rights, which was cut in half earlier this year, and gut offices that oversee every major K-12 program. That includes the $15 billion Individuals with Disabilities Education Act program for students with disabilities and the $18 billion Title I program, which aids high-poverty schools. Smaller programs such as one that supports charter schools were also hit.
The people who work on grants to tribal colleges and historically Black colleges and universities were also let go, just weeks after the administration rerouted $495 million in grant funding to those schools. TRIO, a $1 billion suite of grants to support veterans and college students from low-income families, was gutted.
“The fact that Trump is gleefully using the shutdown as a pretext to hurt students is appalling,” said Sen. Patty Murray (Washington), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “No one is forcing Donald Trump to fire the people who make sure students with disabilities can get a good education – he just wants to.”
Dozens of lawsuits have been filed challenging the administration’s moves in education, and challengers have managed to halt – sometimes temporarily – some of these moves. The administration also faces some political pressure, particularly from advocates for special education, who are working to mobilize parents to lobby members of Congress to fight the changes.
If the new round of layoffs is allowed to proceed, it will probably take time for Americans to feel the ramifications. Federal funding, including billions to help educate students with disabilities, is still flowing. The layoffs to the special education office – impacting 121 employees – would primarily affect the ability of the department to conduct oversight of how the money is spent.
In her X post, McMahon said this oversight is “unnecessary.”
“The Department has taken additional steps to … root out the education bureaucracy that has burdened states and educators with unnecessary oversight,” she wrote.
But supporters say that oversight is important: In the past, the office has held states accountable for failing to provide services to students who qualify and failing to consider applications for services cases quickly enough.
Under federal law, school districts provide special education services, states oversee the districts, and the federal Education Department oversees the states, making sure they follow the federal rules, said Becca Walawender, who was director of policy and planning at the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services until she was laid off in March.
“It’s not this free-for-all where you get money and can do whatever you want,” she said.
At the Office for Civil Rights, there was already a backlog of 20,000 discrimination cases before Trump took office in January. In March, the department closed seven of 12 regional offices and laid off half the staff, and this week, 137 employees in at least four of the remaining five offices received layoff notices. Several attorneys at the agency said in interviews that they have virtually no capacity to do much more than triage and dismiss cases. If the recent round of layoffs stands, they say, the office could virtually disappear.
It is unclear how the agency plans to manage civil rights investigations. “We will figure that out when the government reopens,” department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said.
But Kenneth L. Marcus, who led the Office for Civil Rights under the first Trump administration, said he did not know how the office could function at the staffing levels envisioned and suspects the layoffs are part of a strategy to close the department.
“This action seems to make most sense as part of a broader process that would include closure of the Department of Education and transfer of OCR functions to the Department of Justice, and expansion of Justice Department’s capacity to deal with matters that had previously been dealt with at Education,” he said.
Federal law requires the Education Department’s primary functions to be housed within the agency. But both Trump and McMahon have talked about moving some operations to other departments without congressional approval – and that work has begun.
In May, the Education Department signed an agreement to move nearly $2.7 billion in career, technical and adult education grants to the Labor Department, court filings show.
In April, the department agreed to send nine staffers who work on the $1.6 trillion student loan program to the Treasury Department. A spokeswoman said the assignment is temporary, but two people familiar with the matter said the department is relying on Treasury due in part to staffing shortages at Education. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
“Many of us who are familiar with the statutes didn’t think they could get as far as they have on that,” said Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
These interagency agreements carefully sidestep the statutes by having the Education Department retain oversight and leadership while managing the programs alongside other agencies. Both supporters and opponents see these early moves as test cases that are laying the groundwork for moving more of the agency’s work to other parts of the government.
Trump also has floated the idea of moving the student loan program to the Small Business Administration, and the agency is in active discussions about such a move, according to three people with knowledge of the matter who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. These discussions have explored the feasibility of bringing private lenders back into the federal student loan program or selling off the loan portfolio, these people said.
SBA did not respond to requests for comment.
In addition, McMahon has said that she would like to move the special education office to the Department of Health and Human Services, has said that Pell Grants could be administered by the Labor Department, and has suggested that the Justice Department could take over civil rights enforcement.
The administration is seeing a surprising amount of progress toward the goal of closing the agency, Hess said.
The layoffs were “far more radical than many thought they could get away with,” he said. “They’ve downsized it far more than I think many of us thought would be feasible.”
