The U.S. Department of Education says it is cutting its workforce nearly in half — a first step in carrying out President Donald Trump plans to eliminate the department.
Chalkbeat reports that about a third of the department's staff will lose their jobs through a “reduction in force." Combined with voluntary buyouts, the Education Department will have just under 2,200 employees by the end of the month, compared with 4,133 when Trump took office in January.
“Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a news release.
The layoffs represent a significant escalation of Trump’s efforts to reduce the department’s role in education, which is mostly run by states and school districts. Already, the administration has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and contracts that paid for education research, technical assistance to states and school districts, and teacher training programs.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said the latest cuts "will send class sizes soaring, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle-class families, take away special education services for students with disabilities, and gut student civil rights protections."
The Education Department administers major federal funding programs such as Title I, which provides extra money to high-poverty schools, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which supports special education.
It also investigates civil rights complaints and oversees an accountability system that pushes states to identify low-performing schools and provide them with additional resources. ABC News reports that according to a source, most of the reduction in force affected the Offices for Civil Rights and Federal Student Aid. ProPublica reports that the cuts have eliminated more than half of the offices that investigate civil rights complaints from students and their families.
After the department announced the layoffs, nearly two dozen Democratic state attorneys general sued the Trump administration seeking to halt the layoffs, CBS News reports.
The lawsuit, filed in Massachusetts federal court, contends that the layoffs are unconstitutional and asks the court to halt the Trump administration's effort to dismantle the department.
