Updated: A federal judge on Oct. 15 temporarily halted these layoffs and blocked the Trump administration from carrying out additional layoffs during the federal government shutdown.
A small team overseeing special education programs at the U.S. Department of Education was thrilled when Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced in May one of her chief priorities would be improving literacy through evidence-based practices. It seemed to align perfectly with another initiative the 20-person division, a part of the office of special education programs, had been planning to bolster achievement among different student populations by the end of 3rd grade.
But the onslaught of cuts at the Education Department that had severed nearly half the agency’s staff by March through layoffs and buyout offers made it all but impossible to pursue it. Though the office of special education programs was mostly spared in those layoffs, its staff still shrank, as did the offices that supported its work.
On Friday, the office was dealt another blow: The 20 people remaining on the team that had been planning the achievement initiative were among the approximately 466 staff members cut from the Education Department as part of a governmentwide reduction-in-force during the ongoing federal government shutdown, according to court filings in a case challenging the firings.
“We stopped the planning, because we didn’t have the time or the people to do it,” said an office of special education programs staff member who oversaw research and grants. “Staff always try to align our work with whatever the priorities are of the secretary of the administration. And we could have done things together on that very issue, but we got the rug pulled out from under us.”
OSEP is one of several department offices that could be virtually wiped out by early December, with the cuts from the latest round of layoffs stretching across six of 17 offices in the agency—diminishing teams that oversee civil rights investigations, formula funding and school accountability, competitive K-12 and higher education grants, and services for students with disabilities or experiencing homelessness.
But the exact scope of the reductions is still hazy. The agency has not publicized a list of positions it’s aiming to eliminate, nor a plan for continuing the legally mandated functions those employees currently carry out.
Furloughed staffers—a majority of the department—were told not to check their work emails during the shutdown, so some staffers still haven’t seen their own layoff notices, and aren’t sure how many of their colleagues are poised to lose their jobs.
It’s also unclear whether current staffing cuts will stick. At least one other federal agency that implemented layoffs last week has already reinstated some of the affected positions. The Education Department has, in the past, brought back staff after it “cut a little muscle,” as McMahon put it to lawmakers in the spring.
Many of the education initiatives affected by the latest reductions have enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress for decades. Some of the layoffs even run counter to the stated goals of the Trump administration, slicing into staff who work on programs supporting literacy development, mental health supports, and charter schools.
Without staff to administer these grants, current and former Education Department staffers say, it may still be possible for the federal government to give out money—but anything beyond that, from oversight to assistance, would be virtually impossible.
“I don’t see how you can make the argument that this is not a dismantling of these offices,” said Josie Skinner, an education lawyer who worked in the Education Department’s office of general counsel from 2014 until earlier this year, when the Trump administration laid her off.
A department spokesperson didn’t answer a request for comment in time for publication.
‘The laws are meaningless,’ a former Ed. Dept. employee says, if the agency can’t enforce them
A lawsuit challenging the decision to implement layoffs during a government shutdown is already in motion, with others challenging cuts to legally mandated programs likely to follow. But the suits come after the U.S. Supreme Court already allowed a number of reductions in force at federal agencies to proceed amid ongoing legal challenges, including at the Education Department.
If lawmakers don’t intervene and court challenges don’t succeed, billions of dollars for education grants appropriated by Congress might flow behind schedule or not at all. Civil rights investigators could have mounting caseloads, making enforcement impossible. School districts, state agencies, and parents will have virtually nowhere to turn for help interpreting and enforcing federal requirements, like accountability and school report cards under the Every Student Succeeds Act, staff say.
The department, which boasted more than 4,100 employees when Trump took office in January, shrunk to roughly 2,400 through the layoffs and buyouts. If the cuts are carried out—federal employees are generally entitled to 60 days’ notice before their layoffs take effect—the department would lose roughly 20% of its remaining workforce.
Some schools and states may simply stop following federal education laws altogether, Skinner said.
“If there are not people there to make sure the laws are followed, the laws are meaningless,” she said.
Where cuts are happening
Laid-off staffers collectively manage hundreds of individual grant awards across dozens of formula and competitive programs.
Several offices are set to lose virtually all staffers except a handful at the director level. Out of 80 to 90 current employees in the office of special education programs, fewer than five will remain on the job after the layoffs play out, staffers told Education Week.
The office for civil rights had 605 people and 12 regional offices when Catherine Lhamon, who served as assistant secretary of civil rights during the Biden administration, left in January. The office was one of the hardest-hit by the March layoffs, losing almost half of its staff and seven of its 12 regional offices. Staff in three of the remaining five offices—Atlanta, Seattle, and Washington—began receiving RIF notices last week. Her understanding is that the latest cuts have left just 120 people.
“OCR could not afford any cuts, period, and needed desperately to add staff because of the quantum of harm in schools with respect to civil rights and the many, many thousands of cases coming into the office,” Lhamon said. “Nothing has changed about that.”
And it’s unlikely other entities, such as state civil rights enforcement bodies or courts, can pick up the slack. Before the second Trump administration, OCR had fielded nearly 23,000 complaints in fiscal 2024—triple the number from 15 year earlier—with disability-related discrimination the most common type of allegation, according to the office’s latest annual report.
“When I was an OCR attorney, I had 60 cases at a time, which was still too high, but I could work through a lot of those cases,” said Michael Pillera, director for the educational opportunities project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who resigned from OCR earlier this year. “I, as an outside attorney, can’t file 60 separate cases in court against school districts, and even if I could, that wouldn’t be helpful.”
Administration officials have mused this year about moving functions like special education to other agencies, and have already begun transitioning career-technical education programming to the U.S. Department of Labor. But staffers affected by the latest layoffs say they haven’t heard any indication of a plan for their work to move elsewhere.
“Does that mean the next thing they’re going to do is go terminate all those grants?” said a current staffer in the department’s office of special education programs, who spoke to Education Week on the condition of anonymity after getting a RIF notice on Friday. “Are they going to bring us back in time to help coordinate a transition for this work?”
What Ed. Dept. staff who manage grants do
Cuts to special education staffing would make it virtually impossible for the agency to enforce special education law, effectively rolling back a critical tool for ensuring civil rights for people with disabilities. Some special education employees affected by the cuts themselves have disabilities or are parents of children with disabilities.
“I just can’t imagine our country allowing this to happen,” said the current special education staffer. “... This is historic, big-deal stuff that people fought for.”
Federal employees who work on education grants do far more than calculate allocations and send out money. They maintain open lines of communication with grantees throughout the year, making sure they follow the rules, guiding them on how to make most effective use of taxpayer resources, and collecting data that could inform future projects.
If the department transfers functions to staffers in other agencies, “they’re going to have people who have no experience, and the institutional knowledge that is being lost is unimaginable,” Skinner said.
Without nudging from staffers in the department’s office of well-rounded education grants, for example, many school districts and state agencies wouldn’t have known they’re allowed to spend Title I formula funds on arts education initiatives, said Amanda Karhuse, assistant executive director of advocacy and public policy for the National Association for Music Education.
The department earlier this year removed a 2024 guidance document on that topic from its website. On Friday, all the staff members in that office, which oversees grant programs for arts, civics, and literacy instruction, received RIF notices, Karhuse said.
Who will review grants in process?
If the administration proceeds with its reduction-in-force plans, projects currently on hold because of the shutdown could disappear altogether.
On Sept. 29, the department began accepting applications from states and school districts for $270 million in grant funding to support school-based mental health services, particularly in high-need areas.
In order to award those funds by their expiration date of Dec. 30, agency staffers have to go through a lengthy review process with multiple steps, including reading each application and ranking all the potential recipients.
“It takes a minimum of 90 days to do all of this,” said Kayla Patrick, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who helped launch those programs while serving as a senior policy adviser at the department during the Biden administration. “Even if and when this shutdown ends, there’s no one to do that work.”
Some recently laid-off staffers have already begun looking for other jobs, including signing up for substitute-teaching gigs. Others are holding out hope their jobs will be saved by backlash from members of Congress, intervention by federal judges, or pleas from the general public.
Even if that happens, though, “I don’t know that people will want to go back,” Patrick said. “I think that the damage will be done either way.”
