The Education Department made department-wide cuts on Wednesday, including in its civil rights office, according to multiple sources familiar with the move, a day after President Trump said he’d like to see the department eliminated.
The terminations were primarily sent to newer probationary employees hired within the last year, sources said. Layoff letters were emailed to employees Tuesday. The letters informed employees that they could appeal their firing to the Merit Systems Protection Board if they felt they had been terminated “for partisan political reasons or because of your marital status.”
The firing notifications landed as billionaire and former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive Linda McMahon, Mr. Trump’s nominee to be the secretary of education, faced questions from senators at her confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday.
Mr. Trump has long suggested he wanted to shutter the Department of Education, and his willingness to dismantle much of the U.S. Agency for International Development suggests he could try to follow through on his threats to try to shut down the Education Department. As CBS News previously reported, Mr. Trump is considering executive action that would dismantle the department, ending some programs and shifting some responsibilities to other parts of government, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans.
“Oh, I’d like it to be closed immediately,” the president told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. “Look, the Department of Education is a big con job.”
A spokesperson for the American Federation of Government Employees, one of the largest employee unions, said probationary employees at the Small Business Administration have been affected, too. AFGE doesn’t have an exact number of workers impacted by the layoffs yet. The union said it’s only aware of the workers who have contacted them. McMahon ran the SBA during Mr. Trump’s first term.
It’s not yet clear how extensive the terminations at the Education Department or elsewhere are.
The terminations at the Education Department could complicate McMahon’s hearing, as Democrats press her on whether she would follow through with any plan by the president to close the department “immediately.”
Late Wednesday, a federal judge allowed the Trump administration’s offer to most federal employees to submit a deferred resignation to proceed. A senior administration official said about 75,000 federal workers accepted the offer, though unions warned the federal government may not fulfill its promise to pay them through the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30. The Office of Personnel Management announced Wednesday night that the program is now closed to new applicants.
Jennifer Jacobs and
contributed to this report.