WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Education slashed its workforce in half on Tuesday, laying off roughly 1,300 workers and leaving the agency hamstrung to fulfill responsibilities it’s required by law to carry out.
Every part of schooling in the U.S. could be impacted by the downsizing: It could get harder to get help paying for college, to make sure students with disabilities are fairly treated, and to get critical resources to Spanish-speaking students or schools in rural areas.
The agency now faces the lowest staffing in its decadeslong history, putting students awaiting help from the federal government in indefinite limbo nationwide.
Linda McMahon, the education secretary, defended the cuts this week.
“If you were in the private sector, this would be an audit,” she said on Fox News Tuesday night.
She promised the range of programs Congress approved and long overseen by the department wouldn’t suffer in any way after the Trump administration gutted her agency. But Democrats and current and former employees have significant doubts that the overwhelmed workers who remain will realistically be able to deliver on that promise without sufficient staffing.
“If you get rid of that entire office, where does all of that work go?” said Sheria Smith, a civil rights attorney recently laid off from the department. “We were already barebones anyway.”
Smith’s union, the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents roughly 2,800 workers at the Education Department, compiled preliminary tallies of the laid-off employees this week.
James Murphy, the deputy director of higher education policy at the nonprofit Education Reform Now, analyzed those numbers. Here’s how they break down:
The hardest hit by Tuesday’s layoffs were some of the department’s most vital offices, including the branches that disburse federal financial aid, investigate discrimination and conduct research about American students.
The Federal Student Aid office, which helps students pay for college with federal student loans and Pell Grants, laid off more than 300 people Tuesday, according to the union’s estimates (which include only employees who belong to the bargaining unit and non-supervisory workers). The office had lost roughly a tenth of its staff to recent buyouts, according to an internal list obtained by USA TODAY.
A day after the firings were announced, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, a form that must be filled out annually by every student who wants federal financial assistance paying for college, went offline briefly on Wednesday. The Education Department said the glitch was prompted by problems with a vendor and unrelated to Tuesday’s layoffs.
Also deeply impacted by Tuesday’s cuts was the Office for Civil Rights, which protects students and teachers against discrimination. The Institute of Education Sciences, which conducts congressionally mandated research about schools, was eliminated “wholesale,” Smith said.
The obliteration of the agency’s research arm has raised questions among advocates about how the federal government will track educational progress in the wake of the cuts.
Though most federal government headquarters are in Washington, D.C., its agencies, including the Education Department, have many staff in regional offices from coast to coast. This week’s Education Department layoffs impacted workers far and wide.
The Office for Civil Rights lost 243 people and shut seven regional offices, according to union representatives, former staffers and a lawsuit filed this week by Democratic state attorneys general to undo the layoffs. Those soon-to-be-shuttered field offices were in Dallas, New York City, Cleveland, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia.
D.C., Maryland and Virginia were most affected by the workforce reduction. The terminations hit dozens of workers in California, Texas and Illinois, too.
The Education Department, an agency that’s suffered for years from budget cuts and understaffing, will by the end of March have a smaller workforce than ever before.
Whether it can adequately function with such shortened bandwidth is an open question.
Beth Maglione, the interim president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said in a statement Tuesday the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate the Education Department “without any clear plan to redistribute the workload” are “at best, naive, and, at worst, deliberately misleading.”
“If there is a plan to reassign or redistribute the work of hundreds of federal employees to prevent disruptions for students and families, we strongly urge the administration to share it without delay,” she said.
Javier Zarracina is USA TODAY’s graphics director.
Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.
