Education Department, with mass layoff, cuts nearly half of its staff

The Education Department said Tuesday that it is cutting its staff by about half, a major step toward President Donald Trump’s goal of shrinking the federal role in education and one that was denounced as damaging to American children.

Trump said he wants to eliminate the department altogether, but that is unlikely, as it would require an act of Congress and 60 “yes” votes in the Senate, where Republicans hold only 53 seats. Absent that, the administration has been working to gut the agency by cutting grants and contracts and reducing staff.

The staff reductions announced Tuesday were the largest in department history and of a magnitude rarely contemplated before this administration took office. A senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe details of the layoffs, said that every part of the department would be impacted but also insisted that the reductions would not impact its ability to deliver services to student borrowers, to distribute grant money to school districts or to enforce civil rights law. She said all statutorily mandated functions would continue.

But critics said it was impossible to reduce staff so dramatically without impacting the services states, school districts and students have come to rely on.

The senior department official said Tuesday that 1,315 people were being laid off, and nearly 600 had accepted offers to leave the agency voluntarily. In addition, 63 probationary employees were already dismissed. The reductions will leave a department that had about 4,133 employees on the first day of the Trump administration at fewer than 2,200.

“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,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.

A spokeswoman did not reply to a question about how reducing federal staff would direct more resources to students, parents or teachers.

The senior official said that the department had failed to deliver on its mission and that these reductions would advance Trump’s goal of “returning education to the states.” It was not clear what new authorities or opportunities the reductions would afford states or local districts, which have the primary responsibility of running public schools. She said test scores and education outcomes are unacceptable, but she did not say how reducing the staff would improve them.

American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents more than 2,800 workers at the Education Department, called on Congress to reverse the cuts.

“We will fight these draconian cuts,” Sheria Smith, the union president, said in a written statement, “and urge all Americans to stand up and contact their Members of Congress to tell them—for the sake of our country’s children, educators, neighborhoods, and way of life—to protect the Department of Education’s vital work, working people and our Nation by rejecting these political games.”

Democrats said the reductions would hurt the people the department is supposed to help.

“Donald Trump and Linda McMahon know they can’t abolish the Department of Education on their own, but they understand that if you gut it to its very core and fire all the people who run programs that help students, families, and teachers, you might end up with a similar, ruinous result,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) said in a statement.

Advocates for students said they worried that core functions could experience outages or break down.

Sameer Gadkaree, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, said the staffing cuts could make it difficult for students to obtain or renew financial aid. He feared student loan borrowers might also struggle to receive reliable, accurate advice on student loan repayment. The reduction in staff at the federal student aid office will mean fewer people to monitor the contractors who manage the government’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio and fewer people to field complaints.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a post on X that he had spoken to McMahon, who assured him that the cuts will not impact the agency’s ability to carry out its statutory obligations.

“This action is aimed at fulfilling the admin’s goal of addressing redundancy and inefficiency in the federal government,” he said.

The senior official did not detail the cuts, but she said some offices would be consolidated and gave a few examples of reductions. She said that even small teams inside the department had their own staff for functions such as human resources and information technology and that those functions could be consolidated and offered more efficiently.

She said the department was eliminating leases in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas and Cleveland and was consolidating staff from three buildings in D.C. into one.

On Tuesday afternoon, employees were told that the agency’s headquarters and regional offices would be closed beginning at 6 p.m. that evening and stay off limits through Wednesday. Employees were told to work remotely instead.

Those who are laid off were being told to work remotely until their jobs come to an end on March 21. They will receive severance payments based on their length of service, the official said.

The Education Department is the federal government’s smallest department. At the start of the year, the largest share of its staff—about 1,500 people—worked in the Federal Student Aid office, responsible for administering the student loans and Pell grants.