The Department of Education announced on Tuesday that it would be culling over 1,300 employees, reducing its total workforce to about half of what it was when Trump took office. Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Fox News that night that the mass layoffs were “the first step” towards fulfilling President Donald Trump’s directive to “shut down the Department of Education.”
Democratic attorneys general from 21 states sued over the plan on Thursday, calling it unconstitutional and laying out how the layoffs will “impact nearly every aspect of K-12 education.” New York Attorney General Letita James said in a statement: “We’re not going to sit by while this administration attempts to leave tens of millions of students behind and strip away their access to a quality education.”
Employing just over 4,000 staff at the beginning of the year, the Department of Education was already among the smallest of all the Cabinet-level departments in the executive branch. Created under the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the department is tasked with overseeing funding for public schools, student loan programs, and Pell Grants, as well as overseeing civil rights enforcement and collecting education data.
While Trump claims that the goal of eliminating the department is to “move education into the states,” states and school districts already have control over their own curriculums and the management of education systems. The DOE manages billions in federal funds — which the president is currently using as leverage against colleges and universities — and oversees educational accreditation agencies. While states independently determine what students learn in their classrooms, the DOE supports critical programs — such as Title I — with funding that enables schools and districts to provide resources to low income and disabled students, hire social workers, and even hire additional teachers.
“In a time when we know the gaps are getting wider and not closing, at a time when our student students need us more, we have an administration that is letting Elon Musk and his billionaire buddies raid the Department of Education and take away those much needed funding from our kids so they can find tax cuts for billionaires,” Rebecca Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said last week during a virtual press conference with prominent education advocates and lawmakers hosted by The Education Trust.
“I know that most people don’t necessarily know what the Department of Education does, but they’re finding out, aren’t they,” Pringle continued. “They’re finding out that the federal government has a role to play in the education of our students […] and the historic role of the federal government has been to help close those gaps for our most vulnerable students, our Black and brown and indigenous students, our students living in poverty, our students who who don’t have housing security, our students whose parents are working four and five jobs, our students with disabilities.”
On the same call, former Education Secretary John King, who headed the department under former President Barack Obama, warned that dismantling the agency would mean longer wait times for families seeking support services for children with disabilities, fewer after school programs and extracurriculars, less access to advanced placement programs for low-income students, and an erosion of anti-discrimination policies.
“The history of the education department is as a civil rights agency, the place that ensures that students with disabilities get the services they need, and English learners get the help that they need, that women are protected against sexual assault and sexual harassment on campuses,” King said. “That’s where this happens, in the Office for Civil Rights at the department taking that away harms students and families.”
Keri Rodrigues, co-founder of the National Parents Union (NPU), noted that past efforts to eliminate federal education oversight had ended disastrously. In his 1982 State of the Union speech, former President Ronald Reagan called for the elimination of the department, then only a few years old. “We tried it before under the Reagan administration, and it was a mess, and Ronald Reagan had to walk it back,” Rodrigues said. Reagan slashed funding for the department and downsized it significantly, but ultimately failed to secure its wholesale demise. “There is a reason why we created this agency,” Rodrigues continued. “Because 50 or 60 years ago, you had children who were blind, who were deaf, who had Down syndrome, who were denied access to classrooms.”
Trump’s desire to eliminate the Department of Education goes all the way back to his first presidential campaign (at least). He did what he could to chip away at its integrity during his first administration, and is now truly moving to wipe it out to the extent allowable by law — and perhaps even beyond that.
In January, Trump signed an executive order endorsing the expansion of “school choice” vouchers to allow private and religious institutions to siphon education funds away from public schools. Over the past three decades, the charter school industry has grown exponentially across virtually all 50 states, but concerns have been raised that many of these schools — which are exempt from many oversight requirements and regulations — are riddled with fraud and mismanagement that ultimately harms students.
It was reported last week that Trump was ready to sign another order aiming to eliminate the Department of Education entirely, but the White House later said the story was “fake news.” Trump cannot legally dissolve the department, which was created by Congress, without Congress going along with him, but he can severely gut it, which is what he did this week by firing nearly half of its staff. Trump was asked on Wednesday what responsibility he felt to the civil servants in the department who have lost their jobs. He trashed them. “I feel very badly but many of them don’t work at all,” he said. “Many of them never showed up to work.”
During her Tuesday Fox News interview, McMahon bemoaned the alleged waste she was now tasked with overseeing. At one point, host Laura Ingraham asked the education secretary to explain what the acronym IDEA — Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — stood for.
“Well, do you know what? I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what it stands for,” she said. “This is my fifth day on the job, and I’m really trying to learn them very quickly.”
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