Advocates Brace for Trump Cuts to Education Department, a Step Toward Elimination

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Education Department’s move Tuesday to cut more than 1,300 employees sparked concerns across the country over the ramifications the layoffs could have on the agency’s abilities to carry out its core functions.

As Education Secretary Linda McMahon confirmed Tuesday night on Fox News that the move was a step on the way to shutting down the department, education researchers and advocates cast serious doubt that the department’s key programs would not be affected, predicting harms would be felt by students, families and schools as a result.

“They can say whatever they want in terms of that there won’t be an impact, but there’s no way that cutting half of the staff of the department is not going to have a huge impact,” Robert Kim, executive director of the advocacy group Education Law Center and a former Obama administration official, told States Newsroom.

President Donald Trump campaigned on dismantling the 45-year-old agency in his quest to move education “back to the states.”

In an effort spearheaded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, the Trump administration has taken major steps to slash federal government spending and eliminate what they see as waste, targeting the Education Department and roughly halving the department’s workforce.

‘Bureaucratic bloat’

Asked Wednesday about the department’s mass layoffs, Trump told reporters that he “felt very badly, but many of them don’t work at all — many of them never showed up to work.”

“When we cut, we want to cut, but we want to cut the people that aren’t working or not doing a good job. We’re keeping the best people,” he said.

Trump reiterated that “we’re going to move education into the states, so that the states, instead of bureaucrats working in Washington … can run education.”

Much of the funding and oversight of schools already occurs at the state and local levels, and the federal government legally cannot dictate the curriculum of schools.

McMahon told Fox News on Tuesday that with these cuts, the department took “the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat.”

Sweeping cuts

When Trump took office, the department had 4,133 workers.

But with Tuesday’s cuts, the agency said roughly 2,183 employees remain. In recent weeks, nearly 600 workers took voluntary resignation opportunities or retirement, and in February, 63 probationary employees were terminated, according to senior department officials.

Senior officials said Tuesday the department will also be ending leases on office buildings in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas and Cleveland and will eventually consolidate from three office buildings in Washington, D.C., to just one location.

The layoffs are reported to have hit wide swaths of the department, with the Office for Civil Rights, Office of Federal Student Aid and Institute of Education Sciences taking the biggest hits, according to Education Reform Now, a nonprofit group that advocates for more resources for education.

A step toward elimination

Senior officials stressed Tuesday that the cuts would not affect the department’s ability to deliver on civil rights investigations, the rollout of the federal student aid application, Title I funding for low-income school districts and other statutorily mandated functions Congress has given the agency.

But education law and policy experts disagreed.

“We have to remember: This is one of the leanest Cabinet agencies there is across government — it’s the smallest by far — there was not a lot of fat on the bones in this department,” Kim, who worked in the department’s Office for Civil Rights during the Obama administration, said.

Will Ragland, vice president of research, advocacy and outreach at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, said the cuts are a major step toward the administration’s goal of getting rid of the department.

Ragland, a former teacher who also worked in the Obama-era Education Department, said the “direct impacts from the firings of half of this agency will leave it less able to ensure that kids from low-income communities, students with disabilities, our federal aid processes, run the way they ought to and they reach the kids they’re supposed to.”

Rachel Perera, a fellow in governance studies in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said she thinks the cuts are a way for the administration to “accomplish dismantling the work of the department without going through Congress.”

Perera, who studies inequality in K-12 education, pointed out that some of the department’s offices were already “wildly underfunded.”

“The idea that this is motivated by some genuine interest in making these agencies more efficient is a farce — it’s just ridiculous to engage with those ideas in a serious manner,” she said.

Kim said the cuts should be viewed “in context with the larger goal of this administration, which is to dramatically reduce the federal role in education altogether and to transfer billions of dollars from the public sector into private education.”

“This is not just about staffing,” he said. “This is about a broad reduction, if not outright elimination, of the federal role in education and federal funding and support for education and, in particular, public education.”

Last updated 6:09 p.m., Mar. 12, 2025

by Shauneen Miranda, Virginia Mercury

Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com.