A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s plan to eliminate over 450 Education Department employees in the latest round of mass layoffs. But experts say the government’s intent to cut federal employees providing critical oversight of billions in education funds still poses a serious risk to schools and students.
Nearly all staff members in the Office of Special Education Programs and the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education were affected when the department began issuing termination notices Friday. The Office for Civil Rights also saw new cuts after losing half of its staff earlier this year.
“The track record for challenging [reductions in force] in the courts hasn’t been great,” Emily Merolli, a partner with the Sligo Law Group and a former attorney in the department’s general counsel’s office, said during a call with reporters after the hearing. “We still very much consider these offices and these programs to be in immediate danger.”
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She was among those eliminated in the mass layoffs in March, which were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in July while the case moves forward. In a second case, an appeals court last month gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon the OK to lay off roughly 250 OCR staff and attorneys.
In her ruling Wednesday, Judge Susan Illston from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, a Clinton appointee, said the two employee unions that sued over the layoffs are likely to prove that the administration had no authority to let staff go while they were furloughed during a shutdown. Later this month, she’ll hold a second hearing on whether the employees can remain on the job as the court considers the merits of the case.
It is “far from normal for an administration to fire line-level civilian employees during a government shutdown as a way to punish the opposing political party,” she wrote. During the hearing, she said the department’s “ready, aim, fire approach” to reform would be “enormously disruptive” to students.
On Tuesday, President Trump reiterated comments that he’s using the current government shutdown to slash “Democrat programs that we want to close up or we never wanted to happen.” Advocates have described the cuts as an attack on vulnerable students, including the more than 7 million children who receive services under the Individuals with Disabilities Act. Late Tuesday, nearly 400 organizations issued a statement demanding that the administration “reverse course immediately and restore staffing and transparency at the U.S. Department of Education.”
In a separate statement, state special education directors said they were “confused and concerned” by the cuts and worried IDEA funding could lapse with fewer staff ensuring the payments go out on time. McMahon responded Wednesday, saying that the shutdown has not interrupted funding, including money for special education.
“Two weeks in, millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid and schools are operating as normal,” she wrote on X. “It confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states.”
But Michael Anderson, a lawyer at Sligo and a former department attorney who focused on major grant programs like Title I said the secretary’s statement “loses sight of the big picture.”
Staff cuts are like “deferred maintenance on a car or a home,” he said. “Over time, the effects of not having experienced, knowledgeable staff administering federal education programs” could lead to significant problems.
Even proponents of eliminating the department were taken aback by this latest round of cuts. Neal McCluskey, director of educational freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, has been a vocal supporter of closing the Education Department and said the president has the authority to cut employees as long as he keeps enough staff to do the work mandated by Congress. But he said he didn’t understand how the administration could use the shutdown to justify additional layoffs.
The standoff between Democrats and Republicans over the shutdown “feels like a game of chicken, which is bad public policy,” he said. “But [it] seems to be increasingly how federal politics works.”
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‘Disability doesn’t fly a flag’
News of the cuts over the weekend left parents and advocates feeling betrayed after Trump and McMahon vowed not to cut “anything that was going to harm or infringe upon the rights of kids with disabilities,” said Jennifer Coco, interim executive director of the Center for Learner Equity. The center advocates for students with disabilities who attend charter schools, which often struggle to provide students with disabilities a better education than they’d receive in a district school.
The staff who received layoff notices, she said, “represent decades of expertise in understanding what folks in the field needed … to make things better for kids.”
In March, as part of his effort to close the agency, Trump said it would “work out very well” to move the administration of IDEA to the Department of Health and Human Services. But his administration cut roughly 500 staffers in the Administration for Children and Families in April, and plans to eliminate additional positions at HHS , including those handling grants to improve preschool.
Ensuring that states follow IDEA is one of the core functions of the Office of Special Education Programs, or OSEP. Earlier this year, the office put more than half the states in the country on notice that they were failing to adequately serve children with disabilities.
Nevada struggled with timelines for evaluating students for special education services. Michigan saw a rising number of complaints from parents of children with dyslexia who weren’t receiving the reading help they needed. And an investigation found the District of Columbia often delayed services to young children, forcing parents to file lawsuits in order to get services.
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With or without federal monitoring, states “still have the obligation to make sure that the laws are followed,” said Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates.
But parents often look to OSEP for help. In fact, positions slated for elimination include those who take calls directly from parents of children with disabilities “who probably feel like they have exhausted all of their resources at the state level at the local level,” said Becca Walawender, the former director of policy and planning in the department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.
She took offense at the president’s characterization that special education is a “Democrat program.”
“Disability doesn’t fly a flag,” said Walawender, now a senior adviser to Sligo. “People with disabilities exist in all states, red or blue, across socioeconomic lines, across races, religions. Rural, urban — it doesn’t matter.”
Julie Melear, a parent who has navigated special education systems in Colorado, Virginia and Idaho, sought help from federal staff multiple times when she felt her two boys weren’t getting appropriate services for dyslexia. It took OSEP to require the Fairfax County Public Schools to reimburse her for tutoring services the district was required to provide following the pandemic. Now she has a complaint against the Colorado Department of Education. She argues that the state has refused to investigate districts for failing to reimburse parents at market rates when they seek outside evaluations for their children.
“I am concerned that [the department] essentially is turning over federal dollars to let Colorado do whatever it wants,” Melear said. Colorado is among the states that “needs assistance” from the department, according to federal officials.
A Colorado department spokeswoman said officials had not received the complaint but that districts can “set reasonable cost limits” as long as they don’t prevent parents from getting an outside evaluation.
‘Be careful of what you ask for’
Other parents with a long history of filing state and federal special education complaints point to problems at the federal level. Officials often “moved slowly and allowed noncompliance to continue for too long,” said Callie Oettinger, an advocate in Virginia. There are some parents, she said, who have no problem with federal employees losing their jobs.
“At the same time, they’re terrified because, as problematic as some staff members were, they did more than the states,” she said. “It’s a case of be careful of what you ask for.”
It took federal officials, she said, to force Texas in 2017 to lift an arbitrary cap on the number of students receiving special education services. The limit meant that schools often denied special education services to students with autism, ADHD and epilepsy or offered cheaper accommodations. Gov. Greg Abbott blamed teachers, while educators insisted they were following the Texas Education Agency’s instructions to identify fewer students for special instruction.
“Can you imagine Texas without OSEP’s monitoring?” Oettinger asked. “Not even major investigations by the Houston Chronicle and others, which made the noncompliance public, resulted in the state making its own changes.”
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‘Without any recourse’
The special education office often works hand-in-hand with the Office for Civil Rights when schools violate student rights. In fact, despite the investigations that make the news, nearly 70% of the complaints OCR handles are related to disability, said Beth Gellman-Beer, co-founder of Evergreen Education Solutions, a consulting firm, and a former regional director for OCR’s Philadelphia office.
One OCR attorney who received a layoff notice said she’s “deeply concerned” about how the potential layoffs could affect students.
“The mass elimination of OCR offices that have over 25,000 open cases leaves those complainants without any recourse, let alone answers as to if their case will move forward,” she said. She asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “States are not prepared to handle these concerns.”
States could also see cash flow problems if the department can’t process grant payments in a timely manner because it doesn’t have enough staff, experts said. States and districts have to spend money up front on salaries, supplies and vendor contracts and then request reimbursements from the department.
Small districts, charter schools and rural districts are often “operating payroll to payroll,” Catherine Pozniak, a consultant and former assistant state superintendent in Louisiana, said on the call with reporters. “They cannot afford to wait for weeks to get their reimbursements.”
The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which administers the complex Title I program and and other grants for K-12 schools, was among those hardest hit, losing 132 employees according to an email from the Office of Management and Budget shared with The 74.
The downsizing could affect one of the department’s top priorities: charter schools. In late September, McMahon announced she was releasing $500 million in grants for charters. But if the charter office is gutted, “who’s going to administer those grants and run grant competitions in the future?” Anderson asked.
The proposed cuts also come as states, such as Iowa, Indiana and Alabama, seek waivers from laws related to funding, testing and accountability. In general, states don’t lean on the office for “day-to-day guidance,” said Dale Chu, an independent consultant who focuses on testing and accountability.
But before he resigned Oct. 1, former Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters was preparing to submit a request to cancel all tests required by the Every Student Succeeds Act — a proposal that federal officials said McMahon was unlikely to approve. It’s unclear whether Superintendent Lindel Fields, his replacement, will follow through with the request.
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“If something like Oklahoma’s waiver proposal were on the table, you’d want a functioning federal partner to keep things tethered to the law,” Chu said. He also feels bad for Kirsten Baesler, confirmed last week as the new head of elementary and secondary education. She’s potentially “walking into an office that’s been hollowed out, and she’ll need to rebuild trust and capacity once the lights come back on.”
‘Meaningful work’
After McMahon let over 1,300 people go in March, some career employees knew they were vulnerable. Andrea Falken has spent 15 years working in the Office of Communications and Outreach, where one of her signature accomplishments was running the department’s Green Ribbon Schools program, which recognized schools for saving energy and encouraging sustainability.
“It pleased a lot of people across the country, in red and blue states alike,” she said. “We received scores of notes and even several awards for this work.”
Andrea Falken, right, has worked at the Department of Education for 15 years, but was among those put on leave last week. In 2017, she toured a school in Georgia as part of her work on the Green Ribbon Schools program. (Courtesy of Andrea Falken)
With an administration that plans to roll back efforts to improve air quality and reduce pollution, the department canceled the Green Ribbon program. Falken was reassigned to handle public records requests and draft a weekly newsletter. The office has dropped from about 80 employees to a skeleton crew mostly working on social media, videos, and the department’s website, she said.
“They were not effectively utilizing my 20-plus years of professional experience, graduate degrees or multiple languages,” she said. “They were not using us for meaningful work. They did not want us to do anything, really.”
