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About a fifth of the agency’s remaining staff was affected, including employees working on special education, funding for low-income students and civil rights enforcement.
Oct. 14, 2025Updated 7:12 p.m. ET
A pair of decades-old promises from Congress — ensuring disabled students receive a free and appropriate education and protecting all pupils from discrimination in schools — have been thrown into doubt after a round of sweeping layoffs at the Education Department.
The department’s Office of Special Education Programs was decimated by the cuts, which the Trump administration issued on Friday in its latest reduction of the federal work force. The special education office has been the principal government arm overseeing billions of dollars that support about 10 percent of the nation’s school-aged children, but will have fewer than a half-dozen employees, a reduction of about 95 percent since the start of the year.
The Office for Civil Rights in the department was also slashed. After starting the year with 12 regional sites, the civil rights office was cut in half in March and may go down to a site or two when the layoffs take effect in 60 days, according to data compiled by the union representing education workers. Over 22,600 discrimination complaints in schools were filed with the department last year, more than double the number from five years earlier.
And the layoffs gutted the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees a wide range of funding for states and school districts. The firings included a team of employees who oversee federal funding for low-income students, known as Title I, which is the largest source of federal funding to school districts, according to three Education Department employees with knowledge of the cuts.
About 466 workers at the Education Department have been fired since Friday, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the breadth and depth of those cuts appeared to touch nearly all aspects of an agency that President Trump has vowed to eliminate, part of his bid to end the federal role in supporting roughly 54 million students in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools.
Education Department officials have not disclosed precise numbers on where those cuts were targeted as of Tuesday; the Trump administration declined to discuss the changes, and a spokeswoman declined to comment. The administration has described the more than 4,000 layoffs across federal agencies as punishment to Democrats for the government shutdown.
