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Politics|Trump Firings Gut Education Department’s Civil Rights Division
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/us/politics/trump-firings-gut-education-departments-civil-rights-division.html
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Many of the office’s cases over the decades have served as a catalyst for broader policy change and social reforms.
- March 13, 2025, 5:04 a.m. ET
Decades ago, Congress guaranteed all students an equal opportunity to an education. But now the office created to enforce that promise has been decimated.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights was slashed in half on Tuesday as part of President Trump’s aggressive push to dismantle the agency, which he has called a “con job.” The firings eliminated the entire investigative staff in seven of the office’s 12 regional branches, including in Boston, Cleveland, Dallas and San Francisco, and left thousands of pending cases in limbo.
The layoffs struck every corner of the department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and supports programs for students with disabilities. But education policy experts and student advocates were particularly distressed about the gutting of the civil rights office, which fielded more than 22,600 complaints from parents and students last year, an increase of more than 200 percent from five years earlier.
Some voiced particular concern about what could happen to students with special needs, whose access to education is often left to the federal government to enforce. Many questioned how the Trump administration would be able to handle the office’s case load moving forward — or if it would at all.
“The move to gut this office and leave only a shell means the federal government has turned its back on civil rights in schools,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the office as assistant secretary for civil rights in both the Obama and Biden administrations. “I am scared for my kids and I am scared for every mother with kids in school.”
The Office for Civil Rights, established by Congress, opened along with the rest of the Education Department in 1980. One of the office’s first leaders was Clarence Thomas, now a Supreme Court justice. It is relatively inexpensive compared with other agency programs, with a cost of about $140 million in the department’s $80 billion discretionary budget.
