After hundreds of U.S. Department of Education employees began receiving notices of layoffs on Oct. 1, education advocates began wondering how that would affect the nation’s schools.
The proposed layoffs — which on Wednesday were temporarily halted by a federal judge — are the latest effort by the Trump administration to downsize the department and reduce some payouts to schools. Earlier this year, the administration cut hundreds of millions of dollars in teacher training and mental health grants and laid off hundreds of employees in education research.
Here’s a breakdown of how we got here and what could happen if the administration succeeds in its efforts to carry out the cuts.
How did this all start? Filings from the federal government late Friday and Tuesday say 466 department employees are among more than 2,000 federal workers who began receiving notices of their layoff. The Associated Press reported the layoffs purged nearly all of the employees working in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and in the Office of Civil Rights. Both offices’ existences are required by federal law.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and shift its responsibilities either to other federal departments or back to states. He and other proponents of the idea want to get rid of federal influence and say states should be in charge of education. No shifts have occurred, but hundreds of department employees have been cut.
The administration is also laying off nearly 1,000 employees in the federal Department of Health and Human Services and about 600 in the Commerce Department.
What’s the status of those cuts? A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order Wednesday that halts the latest layoffs while she deliberates a lawsuit from a government worker group over the layoffs.
What do the affected offices oversee? The special education and civil rights offices oversee compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and civil rights laws. North Carolina has more than 200,000 students with disabilities. The Office of Civil Rights was investigating more than 500 civil rights complaints as of Tuesday, for things such as discrimination. It’s not clear what will happen with those investigations now.
The Associated Press reported the department has lost more than half of its staff in layoffs since January.
Why does the administration want to lay off the workers? The U.S. Department of Education didn’t respond to WRAL News questions about why the layoffs occurred, whether cost savings would be repurposed, and how the Trump administration would continue to ensure states’ and schools’ compliance with federal education laws.
Automated phone and email messages cite the federal government shutdown and say messages won’t be returned until the government is reopened, unless returning them is an “excepted activity” from orders to not work.
The department made the most recent layoffs public in a brief Oct. 10 filing in federal court in California, part of a lawsuit against the Trump administration by a federal government employee organization.
The filing didn’t explain the reason for the layoffs, only that the Office of Management and Budget told senior agency officials to consider cutting employees whose work was paid for by discretionary funds that were not renewed during the shutdown, was not funded by another funding source and “is not consistent with the president’s priorities.”
What will this mean for North Carolina schools and students? Education groups are concerned the layoffs will strip away a layer of oversight to comply with federal education laws.
“These layoffs mean that there’s very, very few people left in the Department of Education to administer programs, services and supports and uphold — in the case of the Office of Special Education — a 50-year-old civil rights law,” said Allison Socol, vice president of P-12 policy practice and research at EdTrust, an education advocacy group focused on equity.
“To actually make that law a reality and make it something more than just words on a paper, there have to be humans in an office whose job it is to both allocate the funds that go with IDEA, but also to monitor how states are holding districts and schools accountable for meeting the needs of students with disabilities,” Socol said, referring to the federal law for disabled students.
It’s not clear what will happen to the more than 500 investigations opened during the Biden or first Trump administrations, with hundreds fewer Office of Civil Rights employees. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction hasn’t responded to a WRAL News inquiry about potential impacts in the state.
Socol said civil rights cases “can’t investigate themselves” and that students should be protected by every level of government, including the federal government.
“Without there being folks in the Office of Civil Rights, I think it really raises into question whether those civil rights will be protected moving forward,” Socol said.
It’s also not clear how the department will continue to carry out regular oversight over the state’s special education programs.
The Office of Special Education Programs, which is under OSERS, recently issued a report to North Carolina finding it had failed to meet enough of a select group of standards implementing IDEA, including by not evaluating enough kids on time, letting hundreds of findings of noncompliance go unresolved for more than a year, and for not sufficiently preparing most older students for life after high school.
Only two staff members remain in the Office of Special Education Programs and one staff member remains in the Rehabilitative Services Administration, the Associated Press reported this week. Both divisions are under OSERS and carry out statutory obligations under IDEA.
In a statement this week, the National Association of State Directors of Special Education said that if that’s the case, the layoffs “will make it impossible for the Department to fulfill those responsibilities.”
Parents told WRAL News before the layoffs that they wished the federal education department were more involved in families’ cases, not less. One noted that, even before the layoffs, the federal education department allowed states like North Carolina to investigate themselves in state-level complaints.
What is the Office of Civil Rights and how does it work with North Carolina? The Office of Civil Rights investigates complaints of discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal money via the U.S. Department of Education. If it finds violations, it initiates settlements or letters of enforcement actions to take to comply with federal education laws.
The Office of Civil Rights has 531 open investigations into North Carolina schools and colleges. The investigations surround disability discrimination, sex discrimination, harassment and retaliation, among other things.
The database of active investigations, once updated weekly, hasn’t been updated since Jan. 14 — six days before President Donald Trump succeeded President Joe Biden. Media reports indicate the Trump administration, early on, paused taking on new civil rights cases.
People can file complaints with state education agencies, as well, but those are limited to special education complaints.
In North Carolina, state complaints for special education have grown to 321 during the 2024-25 school year, up from 224 the year before and three times the number of complaints from just a decade ago. Most result in a finding of noncompliance.
What is the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services? The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services oversees programs and services for children and adults with disabilities. That includes providing guidance for applying for grants and deciding which applicants to award grants to.
The Office of Special Education Programs, which is under OSERS, recently issued a report to North Carolina finding it had failed to meet enough of a select group of standards implementing IDEA, including by not evaluating enough kids on time, letting hundreds of findings of noncompliance go unresolved for more than a year, and for not sufficiently preparing most older students for life after high school.
The department issued similar findings in more than two dozen other states.
The Office of Special Education Programs has also conducted special investigations into noncompliance, including a 2017 investigation that found Texas had systematically denied special education services to tens of thousands of students to save money. The investigation was prompted by a 2016 Houston Chronicle series that exposed the problem. The series was published 12 years after the state began using a system that incentivized schools to identify fewer students for special education, previously undetected by the federal education department. The OSEP investigation required the district to re-evaluate students who may have been wrongly denied services, among many other things.