The U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday took the next step in firing more than 250 office for civil rights employees who have been in professional limbo since March, just days after the agency slashed hundreds of other positions during the federal government shutdown.
The department sent out notices to the civil rights employees telling them their last day on the payroll would be Nov. 3. The notices, obtained by Education Week, came more than two weeks after a federal appeals court said the Education Department could proceed with the layoffs while litigation challenging cutbacks that have shrunken the civil right enforcement office by almost half since the winter continues.
The affected employees have been on paid administrative leave since late March, after the department slashed nearly half its staff. And the Education Department had begun to bring some of them back to work under court order until the appeals court intervened.
“The department appreciates your service and recognizes the difficulty of the moment,” Jacqueline Clay, the agency’s human resources officer, wrote in the email to laid-off employees.
Layoffs expand amid federal government shutdown
The latest notices come as the department undertakes another downsizing during the federal government shutdown, during which most of the agency’s staff has been furloughed for two weeks. Approximately 466 additional employees were told their positions would be eliminated by the end of December, including OCR staff who had been spared from the March layoffs.
Together with the layoffs finalized Tuesday, the Education Department stands to lose about 730 employees by the end of the year—about 30% of its remaining staff.
The office for civil rights was one of the largest in the department when President Donald Trump took office in January, with 12 regional offices across the country and more than 500 staff members. But it faced some of the deepest cuts in the departmentwide layoffs announced in March, losing seven of its regional offices and more than 250 staffers. In recent days, the office has been even further depleted, with staff from three of the remaining regional offices receiving layoff notices during the shutdown, telling them their last day as employees will be in December.
The office for civil rights investigates complaints alleging violations of federal civil rights laws and work with schools and colleges to bring them into compliance. It receives tens of thousands of complaints each year on matters spanning sexual harassment, disability access, and racism.
And even as the department faces dwindling ranks, it has become the Trump administration’s top tool to seek changes from school districts and universities that resist Trump’s social policy directives. It has opened more than 100 investigations with a focus on transgender student policies and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives during the second Trump administration. Former staff have worried the diminished office would be unable to keep pace with civil rights complaints while executing the Trump administration’s enforcement priorities.
Legal battles over layoffs continue
Though several lawsuits have challenged layoffs at the Education Department as a whole—which had more than 4,100 employees when Trump took office and now has about 2,400—a more narrowly focused case disputed the firings in the office for civil rights. The case was filed by the Victim Rights Law Center, which represents sexual assault survivors, and the parents of two boys—one in Michigan and one in Nebraska—who had pending civil rights cases that OCR had paused.
Massachusetts-based U.S. District Court Judge Myong Joun told the department in June it had to restore the civil rights positions while the litigation continued. It actually began to reintegrate those employees, albeit slowly, after Joun chastised the department for not complying with his order.
But, running on a parallel track, the Trump administration successfully appealed Joun’s similar directive telling the Education Department to reinstate all laid-off employees to the U.S. Supreme Court. In July, the high court overturned Joun’s order, and allowed the layoffs to proceed.
Armed with the Supreme Court’s decision, the Trump administration appealed Joun’s order in the OCR case. The panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit ultimately sided with administration lawyers in September, agreeing the justices’ logic should transfer to the case focused solely on OCR.
After the federal government shut down Oct. 1, the employees who were expecting layoff notices any day received no updates, though their work email accounts remained active and were used along with other employees’ to blast out the administration’s partisan messaging about the shutdown in automated reply messages.
The agency has paid the dismissed OCR employees nearly $1 million a week in the more than six months they’ve been on paid leave, according to court filings.
Lawyers for the Victim Rights Law Center and the two parents who filed the lawsuit challenging the OCR cuts called the layoffs “devastating for vulnerable students.
“It is disappointing that the administration is determined to follow through with them anyway,” the lawyers, Sean Ouellette, Reid Skibell, and Jonathan Friedman, said in a joint statement. “The cuts will leave families across the country without recourse for discrimination and harassment in school.”
