How Education Department layoffs could impact students with disabilities

Massive layoffs initiated this week at the Education Department could hamstring the federal government’s efforts to assist students with disabilities, former officials and education experts said, citing blows to the agency’s civil rights and research divisions. 

On Tuesday, the department began laying off around 1,300 employees, cutting nearly half the staff in its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and over 100 from the Institute of Education Sciences, according to information released by American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, the union for department staff members.  

The cuts in those two divisions mean there will be far fewer staff members to finish the 12,000 pending federal investigations into allegations of civil rights violations at schools — roughly half of which involve disability issues — and fewer employees to review and distribute government-funded research into effective ways to educate children with autism or severe intellectual disabilities. 

The layoffs are the first step toward dismantling the department, a goal espoused by President Donald Trump and his education secretary, Linda McMahon. Experts say they raise concerns about what the future will look like for civil rights enforcement as the Trump administration continues chipping away at federal oversight. 

“That’s hundreds of investigators who no longer work for OCR and whose expertise that OCR has benefited from over all these years that the nation is now losing,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led the Office for Civil Rights during the Obama and Biden administrations.

Brittany Coleman, a lawyer with the Office for Civil Rights based in Dallas who was laid off this week, said that with fewer staff members, students with disabilities fighting for accommodations for test-taking, for example, will have to wait longer for help from the department — and it could arrive too late.

“What kind of harm does that mean for their grades, for their mental well-being, and how is that going to impact their educational outcomes, which are now not being tracked anymore?” asked Coleman, who also was a shop steward, referring to layoffs at the Institute of Education Sciences. “What is this is going to mean overall for our students who have disabilities as far as them growing up and achieving the same educational goals and dreams that we all have?” 

Neither the Education Department nor the White House have responded to requests for comment. In an interview Tuesday on Fox News, McMahon said that the department will still do what it is required to by law and that funding for schools to support students with special needs will still be provided. Trump defended the layoffs Wednesday, insisting to reporters, without evidence, that many of the terminated staff members were not working or were doing poor jobs.

“We’re keeping the best people,” he said. 

The Office for Civil Rights lost at least 243 union-eligible staff members, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, and an unknown number of supervisors. The office historically had around 600 attorneys handling complaints alleging discrimination based on race, gender, disability and sexual orientation, and most already had caseloads of 50 or more. Schools can also call the Office for Civil Rights for technical assistance to prevent violating students’ rights, but that help could also become less readily available. 

“The provision of education to students with disabilities is complex,” said Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, which represents families of children with special needs in schools. “They have to have an education with specialized instruction-related services, all the supports they need to learn and grow, and there has to be expert personnel to interpret and carry out the statute’s requirements.” 

More than 300 employees in the Federal Student Aid office were terminated, as well, according to the union, slashing more than a quarter of the division in charge of student loans and college tuition grants. 

“It is going to be, I think, a horrific impact for students trying to get information about opportunities to go to college or trade school or just take classes and find out whatever Pell grant money … that they’re eligible for,” said a current department employee, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation. 

Conservatives have cheered the Trump administration’s moves to disband the Education Department, frequently using the refrain that it is time to send education “back to the states,” which are already in charge of their schools’ curricula.  

“There are 50 other departments of education in the United States of America,” Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group, said in an interview last week. “Every state has a department of education. There’s absolutely no reason that we need the bureaucracy, the red tape, the cost.” 

But Democratic governors vowed Wednesday to fight the layoffs — and the broader plans to possibly shut down the entire agency — while also signaling that they are scrambling to find ways to address funding and oversight shortfalls that could result from the cuts. 

“The states can’t totally backfill everything, certainly on education,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, said on a phone call with reporters. He later added that the need to accommodate children with disabilities and other populations expected to be most affected by a reshaped agency could eventually prompt tax increases. 

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said on the call that his office was already working with the state attorney general to fight the layoffs with a lawsuit and that “at some point in time, we will be going to court again.” 

As part of the layoffs announced Tuesday, all employees working out of the department’s regional offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas and Cleveland will be fired. That came as news to top officials in the governors’ offices and education agencies in many of those cities’ states. 

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Illinois State Board of Education had still not received “any formal communication” or guidance from leadership at the Education Department about the layoffs, a spokesperson said. Neither had Kentucky’s education commissioner.

In Montana, however, Susie Hedalen, a Republican who is the superintendent of public instruction, said her office had been receiving dispatches about the layoffs from department officials throughout Tuesday and Wednesday.  

The updates, Hedalen said, have aided her department’s goal in “preparing to take a stronger role” in running some of programs that McMahon and Trump have said they want to move to the states.