11 thoughts about the massive layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education

Trump administration officials announced on Tuesday evening that it is laying off 1,300 employees at the U.S. Department of Education. This is on top of nearly 600 people who had already taken early retirement or buyouts, as well as another 60 probationary employees who had already been fired. This would bring the Department’s headcount down from about 4,100 to about 2,200, a whopping reduction. We don’t know too much about the specifics yet, though news is dripping out describing the reduction in force as affecting virtually every office in the agency. Below are my thoughts on the situation as we understand it now. Some of these will likely change as we get more details about specific cuts.

1. I feel bad for the affected employees, just as I would if there had been massive layoffs at a corporation or manufacturing plant or university. This is likely to negatively impact many families and their kids for many years to come. These are, by and large, smart and patriotic Americans who came to Washington because they wanted to serve the public.


2. It’s a shame that these cuts have apparently been made without regard to employee performance or effectiveness. It’s particularly disappointing that probationary employees were let go, given that they are either people strong enough to have recently earned promotions or were junior people bringing fresh ideas and talent into the federal government. It’s especially galling to see the Presidential Management Fellows program eliminated; it was essentially a Teach For America for federal workers. This doesn’t bode well for future efforts to recruit great people into federal service.


3. That said, some blame has to go to prior Democratic administrations, especially the Biden Administration, which made no progress on reforming the civil service rules to allow managers to let go of ineffective employees and protect their higher performing ones. Instead of tackling these sorts of issues, President Biden hugged the government employee unions as part of his stance toward unions in general, and now we are seeing the results of that.


4. I can understand why advocates of a muscular federal role in education are disappointed by this news. But they lost that fight when No Child Left Behind was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act. At this point, there’s just not much congressional oomph behind the view that the U.S. Department of Education should play a strong leadership role, and therefore, it probably doesn’t need as many staff to do the things that remain in its wheelhouse.


5. I have less patience for the expressions of outrage from the leaders of organizations such as the AFT and the NEA, who have for decades fought against a strong federal role in education, at least when it comes to No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, or other serious efforts to tie accountability to federal funds. It seems like their preferred policy is for Uncle Sam to keep writing checks to states and school districts, and for that money to come without many strings beyond basic fiscal oversight. Note that that sort of passive, pass-through federal role doesn’t require as many staff.


6. I wish the Trump (and DOGE) folks had done more to protect the Institute for Education Sciences, and especially its National Center for Education Statistics. If there’s any part of the federal role that has enjoyed broad bipartisan support for basically forever, it’s research and data collection. Here’s hoping IES finds smart ways to boost efficiency and effectiveness so that crucial enterprise doesn’t suffer.


7. Outside of IES, I don’t anticipate these staff cuts will make much of a difference in the real world of schools and classrooms. I suspect it will be hard to notice much of a difference.


8. That depends, of course, on mundane questions around workload, and whether technology can be used to make certain processes more efficient. A lot of people who work in the Department on K–12 issues are grant or contract officers, and they are now going to oversee perhaps twice as many grants and contracts per person as before. Whether that’s too many probably depends on how important you think oversight of these grants really is.


9. Likewise, the Office for Civil Rights staff will need to handle more complaints per person than before. They won’t have the capacity to launch proactive investigations, but in my view that’s a good thing. I didn’t like it when Democratic administrations used disparate impact theory to investigate school districts for supposedly disciplining too many students of color, and I don’t like the idea of the current administration launching proactive OCR investigations to try to stamp out DEI, which they will now have less horsepower to do.


10. There will now be fewer people working on the big formula grant programs, like Title I, Title II, and IDEA. Some people worry that that means questions from states and school districts won’t be answered as quickly as before. But given that the underlying statutes haven’t changed in a long time, I’m not sure why there are a whole bunch of questions to begin with or why we think people at the federal level necessarily have the answers.


11. Whatever you think of these cuts, we should try to keep a sense of scale. Our K–12 education system employees something like 6 million people around the country. In that context, 2,000 jobs is a drop in the bucket. That cuts against the argument from people on the left that the “sky is falling.” But it also cuts against the argument from the Trump folks that they are achieving meaningful savings. If you want to go after the real waste, fraud, and abuse in America’s education system, you need to do it at the local level, not in Washington. After all, that’s where the money is.