WASHINGTON—Even before a revealing new internal report from the federal Education Department’s Inspector General, the nation’s two big teachers unions had slammed the Donald Trump regime’s deep cuts at the federal agency.
And some of the cuts were so deep they endangered the department’s ability to carry out its mission to help the nation’s teachers teach, and students learn, the IG’s office warned on June 29. The total cut at headquarters at that time was 60%.
The Education Department has been an ideological target of the radical right and MAGA almost from the day the Democratic Carter administration created it in 1979.
The right contends the department has a political agenda that is prejudiced against white “Christians.” They also hate its stands on such issues as comprehensive history texts, civil rights for LGBTQ students, and against school prayer.
Trump entered his second term on Jan. 20, 2025, vowing to eliminate the department. But he can’t do it by law; only Congress can. Even some Republicans are reluctant to demolish it. So Trump and his Education Secretary, GOP donor Linda McMahon, are dismembering the department instead.
Many of the cuts have been drastic, the IG reported. Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten, a New York City civics teacher, and National Education Association President Becky Pringle, a Philadelphia science teacher, have blasted them.
The Office of English Language Acquisition, which helps distribute funds for English as a Second Language programs, and especially programs that served immigrants, went from 16 staffers to one, a 94% cut, in those first three months of Trump’s term. This year, that last staffer was transferred to the Labor Department.
The department’s Office for Civil Rights was cut by 42%, from 598 workers to 346. Though the IG didn’t say so, the remaining workers were ordered to concentrate on “discrimination” against whites.
The Office of Federal Student Aid—the largest office in the D.C. headquarters—lost 60% of its staff and all of its programs. The numbers went from 1,446 to 578. Its federal student aid programs were shoveled off to the Treasury Department, leaving staffers and past and present borrowers in limbo.
McMahon called the transfer of student aid administration ”an intentional and historic step toward breaking up the federal education bureaucracy.”
AFT’s Weingarten and Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, retorted even before the IG’s report that “the Trump administration’s continued gutting of the Department of Education is a catastrophic attack on higher education.” The department’s Office of Postsecondary Education was cut from 176 workers to 33, the inspector general reported
“By scattering vital student protections across multiple bureaucratic agencies entirely unequipped to handle them, this administration is actively sabotaging the future of American college students,” the duo said. AAUP is now an AFT sector.
“Transferring civil rights enforcement to a Department of Justice that appears primarily focused on prosecuting President Trump’s political enemies will strip marginalized students of vital protections, leaving them more exposed to systemic discrimination,” they added.
NEA President Pringle focused, in her prior statement, on the wider impact of cutting civil rights enforcement, particularly of Title IX of federal education law. It bans discrimination by gender and mandates equal treatment at institutions—notably colleges and universities—which receive federal funds, including through student aid.
“Title IX guarantees that all students, regardless of sex—including their gender identity or sexual orientation—can learn in safe, welcoming environments. Rolling back agreements designed to address discrimination puts those protections at risk and raises serious concerns about student safety and equity,” said Pringle.
Besides the cuts at the Education Department’s offices for Civil Rights, Federal Student Aid, English as a second language grants and Post-Secondary Education, other cuts at the department in the first half of 2025 included 41 people fired out of the 50 workers in Secretary McMahon’s Office, 47 workers fired out 77 total in the Deputy Secretary’s office and one worker cut out of the nine toiling for the Under Secretary,
There was a 16% cut out of 191 workers in the Office of Education Sciences, which studies effectiveness in the classroom, 35 were fired out of 115 total in the General Counsel‘s office, two-thirds were cut from the 54 in the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education, 26 out of 67 (39%) from the Office of Communications, 44 of 92 in the chief information officer’s bailiwick,152 fired out of 177 total workers in the Special Ed office, and 226 out of 294 in the Elementary and Secondary Education office, among others.
Of the 413 workers in the department’s Office of Finance and Operations—the auditors and nuts-and-bolts managers—326 lost their jobs. And Secretary McMahon now must do most of her own lobbying. All 14 of her legislative staffers were let go.
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