On March 11, 2025, the Department of Education (ED) announced that it had “initiated a reduction in force impacting nearly 50% of the Department’s workforce.” Put more plainly, the Secretary of Education notified 1,315 of her employees that they “will be placed on administrative leave” next week, which will likely lead to their termination, on top of the nearly 600 employees who resigned in the past two months.
Those public servants are experiencing the most immediate impact and harm from this action, but the effects of this drastic reduction in the size of the department will be felt by students, families, and educators across the country. Thanks to a now-former ED employee who shared a list of union employees who were notified yesterday, we have a fairly clear picture of the Trump administration’s target. You can see the list of positions that were eliminated here (n.b., errors on the list are possible. At least one person on it has identified themself as having not been notified. We will monitor this carefully.)
This chart shows a breakdown of the programs where the cuts occurred.
Federal Student Aid saw the biggest cuts in terms of numbers, but as a share of total full time employees in 2024, however, the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences took the biggest hits.
Finally, here’s a list of the 10 most eliminated roles at ED. Lawyers and analysts were heavily targeted.
Little was spared by the Secretary of Education, but the largest targets were financial aid, the science of education, and civil rights. It is very difficult to see how these cuts won’t, at the very least, lead to a significant degradation of the services provided by the Department of Education. Recall what the Government Accountability Office found last year when it looked at the launch of the so-called “Better FAFSA.” The use of outside vendors, mismanagement, and understaffing led to the late launch of the federal financial aid application, severe technical problems, and nearly 75% of customer calls to the service center went unanswered. The good news is that the FAFSA got back on its feet this fall and was running much better, but it is hard to imagine that that will continue with hundreds fewer employees.
The radical cuts to the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) may not be as noticeable to ordinary Americans, but the impact will be severe if these employees are not returned to their jobs. IES is the home of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which collects and publishes invaluable data used by education researchers, policymakers, civil rights groups, advocates and others to understand the condition of education in America and how to make it better. NCES is also the home of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, because it is the most reliable assessment to track and compare academic progress across the country. This data has been vital to monitoring and scaling some of the biggest movements in education, such as Mississippi’s Science of Reading initiatives. Without the data—or the staff to collect and disseminate it—policymakers will struggle to understand what is working for students and where to demand improvements.
The elimination of nearly half the workforce at the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) means that the safety and rights of students from kindergarten to graduate school are less protected. For example, families with children who have special needs will likely face even greater challenges and delays in accessing special education services and interventions for which they are legally entitled. Investigations into alleged discrimination based on race or ancestry or harassment experienced by women will be slower, if investigated at all. OCR lawyers have long been overworked and moved slowly through huge workloads. Eliminating these employees will make that situation worse. It is important to say that these cuts, as with so much else from the past two months, will likely end up in courtrooms.
Congress created the Department of Education, Federal Student Aid, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the Office for Civil Rights with the expectation that the agency and its programs would carry out their responsibilities. These cuts and the loss of so much expertise will make that much more difficult. There may well be a positive resolution to this latest crisis, but not before real harm will have been done to the employees who served American education and to American education itself.