Civil rights attorneys who investigate discrimination complaints against schools and colleges in New Jersey were among the 1,300 United States Education Department employees laid off this month by the Trump administration.
Attorney General Matt Platkin has filed a lawsuit with other states’ attorneys general seeking to block the layoffs.
Seven of the 12 regional offices in the department’s Office for Civil Rights were shut down last week, Platkin’s lawsuit says. That includes the New York office, which covers New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, according to news reports and other sources.
The Trump administration did not reply to an email asking for comment. It pointed to Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s comments signaling the layoffs in a separate email.
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Neither Trump nor McMahon has made public statements about the layoffs and voluntary resignations at the U.S. Education Department.
The Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE and headed by Elon Musk, is orchestrating staff cuts throughout the federal government and has promised transparency in its work. However, the DOGE website does not provide any information about cuts to the U.S. Education Department’s New York regional office, or numbers of latest workforce reductions in the department overall.
The department’s Office for Civil Rights — as well as its statistical arm, the Institute of Education Sciences — were among the hardest-hit offices in the department as a share of their total full-time employees, according to data charts published by Education Reform Now, a Washington think tank.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights enforces laws designed to protect students from forms of discrimination and harassment that violate U.S. law. Civil rights complaints gained a higher profile in the last two years during campus protests that spread across colleges after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel by Hamas, and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza that followed in response.
The U.S. Education Department employed 48 people who were based in New Jersey as of September last year. Of those, 15 were attorneys, and at least 18 were employed in the office that handles federal student aid, an analysis of federal employment data showed.
To obtain that information, the USA TODAY Network downloaded raw data from the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources agency, with federal employment numbers from September 2024.
Employees of the New Jersey Department of Education will not lose their jobs as part of federal “reductions in force,” said spokesperson Laura Fredrick. “While NJDOE does rely on federal funding to support some staffing capacity,” the federal government “does not have the authority to terminate New Jersey state employees,” she said.
In addition to administering federal grants for low-income and disabled K-12 students across the nation, the U.S. Education Department collects long-term data about how American students are performing, administers federal dollars for student loans, and addresses violations of U.S. anti-discrimination laws, without litigation in trial courts.
“The Education Department primarily sets regulations, allocates federal funds, and supports best practices across various programs,” Fredrick said. “NJDOE staff members interact regularly with their counterparts … to implement federal funds and federal programs.”
New Jersey education officials are in the dark about the Trump administration’s plans for federal education employees.
So far, New Jersey education officials have received few details other than through press releases, “making it difficult to evaluate specific impacts these changes will have on our agency and New Jersey’s students,” Fredrick said.
The state “will continue to monitor and evaluate any additional information” made available and “continue to carry out our mission of ensuring that all New Jersey students have access to high-quality education,” she said.
“I’m devastated and angry,” said Robert Kim, executive director of the Newark-based Education Law Center, who testified in Congress on Feb. 26 against Trump’s move to dismantle or severely shrink the U.S. Education Department.
“These are some of the most talented civil rights attorneys out there, and there are hundreds of them,” he said, referring to layoffs in the civil rights offices and closures. Kim is a former U.S. Education Department attorney and political appointee during the Obama administration.
“They came to work for the government because they believed in civil rights, they believed in prohibiting racial discrimination, protecting students from sexual harassment and violence, and to ensure that students with disabilities get the services that they’re entitled to under the law,” Kim told NorthJersey.com.
“These are among the most talented and altruistic people that you can imagine. They could have much more lucrative careers in the private sector, but they came to the government,” he said.
Polls show that most Americans, across party lines, do not support doing away with the U.S. Education Department.
The layoffs signal the Trump administration’s long-term alignment with plans proposed in the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025, to “radically” reshape schools, Kim said.
Cutting federal funding for the poorest students, called Title 1 grants, and for disabled students, called IDEA funding, by changing these formula-based calculations into “block grants” over a 10-year period, as Project 2025 advocated, would be dangerous, Kim said.
On average, federal funding makes up less than 10% of state education budgets.
The Heritage Foundation’s education policy director, Lindsay Burke, supported closing the federal Education Department, in comments made to Congress. Burke testified alongside Kim on Feb 26.
“Congress should pass a Department of Education Reorganization Act to remove Cabinet-level agency status from the department, eliminate ineffective and duplicative programs, and send remaining programs to other agencies,” she said, adding that ultimately it is parents who can restore “academic excellence in America.”
Kim said, “I worked in the Education Department, so I know there’s not a lot of excess staff there.”
“Nobody can dispute” the value of “creating more efficiency and leanness in government,” he said. “This notion of getting rid of bureaucracy, it’s very convenient, but not in reality, when you understand what people are doing and how they help the public.”
There was nearly “double the number of staff members in the civil rights office” during the Reagan administration, he said, even with “15 times less the number of complaints” than now.
“Over the life of the agency,” the civil rights office’s “overall staffing level has declined significantly, falling from nearly 1,100 full time staff in 1981 to 556 in 2023,” the department said in its annual fiscal year 2024 report. “This reduction comes even as the volume of complaints received has grown significantly, increasing from under 3,000 in 1981 to 19,201 in 2023,” the report said.
USA TODAY reporter Erin Mansfield contributed to this story.
