Trump Fires More Education Dept. Employees

Staff members at the Department of Education will be affected by the mass layoffs taking place across the federal government, a spokesperson said Friday.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has threatened the layoffs for weeks, citing the government shutdown. Vought wrote on social media Friday that his promised reduction in force had begun.

A department spokesperson then confirmed in an email to Inside Higher Ed that “ED employees will be impacted by the RIF.” The spokesperson did not clarify how many employees will be affected or in which offices. Other sources say no one who works in the Office of Federal Student Aid will be laid off.

Nearly 95 percent of department employees who don’t work on federal student aid were furloughed when the shutdown began Oct. 1.

The Education Department already lost nearly half its career staff members during a first round of mass layoffs in March.

The federal workers’ union and multiple outside education advocacy groups have since challenged those layoffs in court. Lower courts blocked the RIF, but the Supreme Court overturned those rulings in July. Affected staff members officially left the department in August.

Another lawsuit challenged this latest round of layoffs before the pink slips had even been distributed. It was filed at the end of September.

One source with connections to staffers who were still working at the department as of Friday morning said as he understood it, the latest round of cuts will at least affect staff members from the offices of elementary and secondary education and communications and outreach.

A senior department leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Inside Higher Ed that the layoffs were directed by OMB and came as a surprise to ED.

“Last week the [education] secretary’s office had said no RIFs at all,” the senior leader explained. “We heard on Tuesday that OMB sent over a list of people for ED to RIF … ED apparently edited it and sent it back.”

In neither case were cuts planned for the Office of Federal Student Aid, which manages the Pell Grant and student loans, the senior leader added.

Rachel Gittleman, president of the union that represents Education Department employees, promised in a statement to fight the layoffs.

“This administration continues to use every opportunity to illegally dismantle the Department of Education against congressional intent,” Gittleman said. “They are using the same playbook to cut staff without regard for the impacts to students and families in communities across the country … Dismantling the government through mass firings, especially at the ED, is not the solution to our problems as a country.”

Through late September and into the first 10 days of the shutdown, both Vought and President Trump used the threat of further RIFs to try to convince Democrats in the Senate to acquiesce and sign the Republicans’ budget stopgap bill. But Democrats have stood firm, refusing to sign the bill unless the GOP meets their demands and extends an expiring tax credit for health insurance.

The Washington Post reported that the layoffs were expected to affect fewer than 16,000 employees total.

Health and Human Services Department spokesperson Andrew G. Nixon wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that “HHS employees across multiple divisions” received layoff notices. But he didn’t provide an interview or answer written questions about whether the layoffs include employees at the National Institutes of Health, a major funder of university research.

Nixon wrote that “HHS under the Biden administration became a bloated bureaucracy” and “all HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions. HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”

Democrats and some Republicans have warned against the layoffs. But the Democrats in particular have argued that firing federal workers during a shutdown is unconstitutional.

“No one is making Trump and Vought hurt American workers—they just want to,” Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington State Democrat and vice chair of the appropriations committee, said in a statement Friday afternoon. “A shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers to cause more chaos or permanently weaken more basic services for the American people … This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks.”