Education Department Documents Detail Massive Scope Of Agency Worker Terminations

The Trump administration’s steep workforce cuts at the Education Department include hundreds of attorneys, student aid workers and civil rights office staff, according to agency documents obtained by POLITICO.

Lawyers who worked on regulatory, legislative and education programs in the department’s general counsel’s office are expected to be terminated alongside policy staff and technical workers in special education and information technology offices. In some cases, human resources departments for satellite locations will be hollowed out, and information technology specialists let go.

The documents, which provide a detailed view of the unprecedented wave of Education Department employee terminations, account for nearly 1,000 planned staff terminations. One of the documents is an organizational chart indicating which offices the staff cuts would hit. The agency is among the first federal agencies to announce their plans for a reduction in force following President Donald Trump’s broader effort to slash the ranks of government service.

On Tuesday, an agency official said the cuts would hit about 1,300 people out of the roughly 4,130 people employed at the department, on top of the hundreds of others who took separate buyout and “deferred resignation” offers.

Just hours before the reductions were announced, agency leadership directed their workers to leave government buildings and not return until Thursday.

The cuts also targeted workers in the department’s finance and operations office, which supervises the department’s financial management, accounting and training operations.

Further cuts at the department’s office of Federal Student Aid included specialists responsible for reviewing financial assistance programs at colleges and universities — including in major regional offices in New York, Boston, Dallas and Kansas City. FSA’s technology services, vendor performance and executive divisions were also expected to get significant cuts.

A student aid team that did community outreach around financial literacy was completely eliminated, according to a former FSA official with knowledge of the cuts. Their work included FAFSA completion workshops, education around various student loan repayment plans and lesser-known forgiveness programs for incarcerated borrowers or those on permanent disability, the person said.

The department did not respond to requests for comment about the specific cuts within the agency.

Other cuts targeted the department’s elementary and secondary education office, as well as the agency’s office for English language acquisition for immigrant students.

The department’s Institute for Education Sciences is slashing research analysts and statisticians from multiple divisions inside its ranks, suggesting additional major changes are in store for how the department collects and reviews data that informs education policy decisions across the country.

The firings are the first step toward Trump’s goal of fully shutting down the department, officials said, though such a move would require congressional approval.

“We wanted to make sure that we kept all of the right people, the good people, to make sure that the outward-facing programs — the grants, the appropriations that come from Congress — all of that are being met,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Fox News on Tuesday. “And none of that is going to fall through the cracks.”

Education Department officials insisted that the department’s reductions in force are targeted at duplicative work inside the agency and that job cuts will not affect the work of the department’s Federal Student Aid office, its civil rights investigations or how the department distributes federal funding for low-income and disabled students.

“Our primary concern is the lack of transparency about which functional areas are being cut, why specific departments have been selected for dismantling, and how the transition will be managed without disruption to students or the nation’s institutions of higher education,” Beth Maglione, the interim president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said in a statement Wednesday.