Emotional Education Department ‘clap-outs’ celebrate departed federal employees

Dozens of emotional Department of Education employees took part in a final “clap-out” in Washington, D.C., after losing jobs amid the Trump administration’s agency restructuring.

The administration slashed about 50% of the department’s workforce as part of President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s strategy to abolish the department and send education decisions to the states.

The departing civil servants, who have either been terminated, retired or voluntarily bought out, have each been given about 30 minutes to retrieve their belongings this week — before exiting the building to clapping colleagues who were screaming “thank you!” outside the offices in Washington, D.C.

The last education chief, former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, visited his old office to celebrate employees affected by the workforce shakeup.

Clapping, shaking hands and cheering them along, Cardona told the civil servants, “Thank you for your service.”

“These public servants that are walking out right now deserve a thank you. They deserve respect. They’ve worked hard — not just during the time that I served as secretary but before that,” Cardona, wearing plain clothes, told reporters in a brief statement outside agency headquarters.

“I’m here, for the staff here, to say thank you,” he added.

DeNeen Ripley shook Cardona’s hand and told him her entire transportation division was eliminated. Ripley has worked at the department over 30 years and said she is taking an early retirement now.

“It feels like a death,” Ripley told ABC News. “It feels like a bad divorce of sorts, it just feels heartbreaking.”

Despite the massive overhaul and almost 2,000 employees lost, McMahon has stressed the Department of Education will continue to administer its statutory functions that students from disadvantaged backgrounds rely on, including grants, formula funding and loans.

“The president made clear today that none of the funding will stop for these [programs],” McMahon told ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott after Trump’s executive order signing last week, which directed McMahon to use all necessary steps permitted under the law to abolish the agency she’s been tapped to lead.

“I think it is his hope that even more funding could go to the states. There will be more opportunity for it. And, you know, he means what he says. And so there’s not going to be any defunding or reduction in funding,” she added.

A dream job “snatched”

Washington, D.C., native Leondra Richardson and a crowd of emotional colleagues across the department left the near-defunct agency’s headquarters for the final time Friday.

“It was a dream job,” Richardson told ABC News. “And that dream was snatched from me by the new administration.”

Richardson said her entire office, the Office of the Chief Data Officer, was folded earlier this month by the “reduction in force” implemented on March 11.

Sydney Leiher, a midlevel career public servant, said she felt forced out and doesn’t know what’s next for her. After leaving with her belongings, including a beach volleyball and Trader Joe’s sack, Leiher stressed the reforms are not only unjustified but also unpopular.

“It’s definitely emotional,” Leiher said, holding back tears. “I feel bad for all of the people in the Chief Information Office who have to, like, gather all of our laptops and equipment — like, they don’t want to be doing this either.

“It’s just a really sad day. But seeing the support out here from all of other Department of ED staff and then also, like, other federal agencies and then the public just makes it shows to me that, like, people do not want this, and like, this is not popular, and this shouldn’t be happening,” Leiher added.

Richardson and Leiher both worked in the same division, the OCDO, that was shuttered. Without the office, Richardson said there will hardly be anyone left at the federal level to collect data to show student improvements or delays.

The Trump administration has claimed it is making cuts to rid the government of bureaucratic bloat, but Richardson told ABC News her IT job was not policy based or bureaucratic. Leiher, an analyst who worked on artificial intelligence machine learning, told ABC News that she took this job after returning from the Peace Corps. She added that civil service work shouldn’t be about politics.

“I believe in public service,” Leiher said. “I believe in a nonpartisan civil service. We’re important, we matter.”

Meanwhile, departing civil servants such as Dr. Jason Cottrell, a data coordinator in the Office of Postsecondary Education, the largest grant-making division in the department, said he believes students are being put in jeopardy as the Department of Education is diminished.

“Our nation’s students are going to suffer,” Cottrell said. “I think of the doctoral students that are, you know, trying to do research on cancer or, you know, learning or whatever it may be, and without the funds to support them, they are going to — it’s going to be hard for them to succeed without those funds, and we’re not going to gain that knowledge that we need.”

The farewell ceremony at the department comes as “clap-outs” are set to continue across the country next week at regional offices in places such as Cleveland, Dallas and San Francisco. But these moments hit especially close to home for Richardson, who detailed how she overcame a teenage pregnancy while growing up east of the river in the Southeast quadrant of the city.

She said it’s so close yet so “far away” from the federal government.

“I hate that I can’t be a voice or inspiration to the young girls growing up in Southeast D.C. that I wanted to inspire,” Richardson said, adding that she “wanted to give a chance to, you know, show that there’s another way and you can make it forward.”

“You can make a big impact and a big difference in the country coming from where we from,” she said.

ABC News’ Alex Ederson contributed to this report