For hundreds of civil servants, today marks the end of their work at the U.S. Department of Education, though most haven't been allowed to work since March when they were placed on leave and later laid off. These employees performed a wide range of jobs, from safeguarding students' civil rights to helping borrowers navigate a bewildering federal student loan system.
Nearly 1,400 department workers are being fired as part of a broad reduction in force (RIF) that began on March 11. Days later, when President Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Education Department, he said, "We're going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs."
He also claimed that many department employees "don't work at all" and that "we want to cut the people that aren't working or are not doing a good job."
Trump's education secretary, Linda McMahon, called the mass firing "a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system."
In all, including workers who have elected to leave, the department will employ roughly half the staff it had when Trump took office. The department did not respond to multiple requests to confirm precisely how many employees are leaving and how many will remain.
To mark their departure, half a dozen department workers spoke with NPR, eager to tell their side of this story about the work they did and why they think it matters.
David Downey, Office of Grants Management, 30 years of service
The Education Department sends billions of dollars to states to help pay for public education. Downey's role was to help state and local officials understand how to apply for that money and then "ensure that they're using taxpayer dollars properly. That's where I hang my hat."
Downey says he served Democratic and Republican administrations, including eight years under President George W. Bush helping faith-based groups navigate the funding process.
One of the first things this Trump administration asked him to do, Downey says, was to review department policy for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). In January, Trump signed an executive order calling DEI illegal and arguing that such programs "undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system."
Downey says he did as he was asked but disagreed with what he considered efforts to roll back civil rights protections for students of color and kids with disabilities.
"It was an affront to the Civil Rights Act of 1964," he says. "It was as if they were trying to go back to 1963 — before that law was passed."
The March RIF moved swiftly: "At 6:06 a.m., before I received any communication [about] being on leave, I was unable to access my email outside of the department," Downey says.
"We actually had colleagues that were supposed to be meeting with state departments of education the next day, and we had no way to even tell them we couldn't be attending the meeting. It was a really unprofessional, frustrating and insane experience."
This RIF, Downey says, "creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you think that government is inefficient and a failure and is letting down America's students and American educators, cutting this agency in half is a really great way of proving that belief correct."
In a July press release after the Supreme Court allowed the staff cuts to be finalized, Secretary McMahon said, "the Supreme Court again confirmed the obvious: the President of the United States, as the head of the Executive Branch, has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies."
Downey says he's moving back to his native Kentucky. "I love helping people, and [civil servants] care. We care. We are your neighbors, and we care. And our oath to the Constitution isn't going to end when Trump stops the paychecks."
Jason Cottrell, Office of Postsecondary Education, 9.5 years of service
Among the department's core functions is the collection and analysis of data — Cottrell's job. Without data and the stories it tells, he says, there is no way to know if taxpayer dollars are being spent responsibly or if the programs they're paying for are actually helping children. And the March staffing cuts "directly harm data collections and data analysis," Cottrell says.
McMahon said these cuts reflect the administration's "commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers."
Cottrell argues that cutting data collection and analysis will do the opposite. "That's really the bottom line: Are we protecting the taxpayers? And without staff at the department, it's going to harm those data collections."
Cottrell is a member of AFGE Local 252, a union of Education Department employees.
In the weeks leading up to the March RIF, Cottrell says the atmosphere at the department was tense. "There were days where I would come home and just break down because they are traumatizing you. They are telling you that they are trying to eliminate your position."
Nevertheless, congressional Republicans recently passed a massive tax and spending bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, containing much of President Trump's domestic agenda. And it includes an enormous amount of new, additional work for the Education Department, including a sweeping new system to punish colleges and universities whose degrees don't benefit students.
This is precisely the kind of data-dependent project that Cottrell and his colleagues would have helped build.
"I don't think that they're gonna be able to do it with the small staff that they now have," Cottrell says. "Some of that would have fallen in my responsibility to ensure that the data are of high quality, that they're being collected in the best ways, and they have [cut] my area."
The department insists it can implement the new law and has begun rolling out its plans.
Like Downey, Cottrell spoke of his passion for public service. "My grandfather worked in the Secret Service in the '50s and '60s. He helped build the communication towers at Mount Weather [Emergency Operations Center], and I've got his Secret Service badge. … It is critically important to me to make a difference in the lives of our nation."
Emily Merolli, Office of the General Counsel, 12 years of service
Merolli, speaking in her personal capacity (not as an employee of the department), says that as an attorney in the general counsel's office she was responsible for developing education-related legislation, including amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal law that guarantees all children with disabilities the right to a free and appropriate public education.
"It wasn't long ago that students with learning disabilities were not given access to public education," Merolli says, "where kids were institutionalized and they weren't allowed to learn."
But IDEA and, later, the Department of Education itself, changed that, Merolli says, and one job of OGC attorneys is to make clear to school districts, "these are the basic obligations that you need to meet to do right by these kids and to follow the law."
After Merolli and most of her colleagues in the general counsel's office were laid off in March, though, she's worried. "There is a big danger that, without the ability to enforce, which is really down to OGC, we're going to lose a lot of accountability," she says. "I am worried about students with disabilities and their families being left vulnerable and without a mechanism for making sure that their kids are receiving the services that they are legally entitled to and they are morally entitled to."
On whether the department can make good on Republican promises in the new legislation, Merolli says, many critical offices in the department are "completely decimated. To think that they will be able to fulfill all of these new statutory obligations is bananas to me."
Again, the department maintains that it will implement the new law and has begun releasing its plans.
Merolli describes Trump's argument that cutting the department is somehow empowering states as "an excellent talking point that doesn't have basis in legal reality."
Education, she adds, "is and has always been a function of the states." And the Education Department "does not determine what your kids are learning in schools. They make sure that baseline standards of education are being met for each student, no matter what their ability, no matter your financial situation. No matter where your school is located, be it an urban school or a rural school. It's making sure that students have access to high-quality education."
Sheria Smith (nine years of service), Brittany Coleman (six years), Office for Civil Rights
As part of the March layoffs, the Trump administration closed seven of OCR's 12 regional offices: Dallas, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
Smith and Coleman worked as attorneys in OCR's Dallas office. Smith is also the president of the AFGE Local 252 and Coleman is its chief steward.
Attorneys in the civil rights office are responsible for investigating complaints from the public "that students are being treated unfairly because of something they can't help — because of their race or sex or disability," says Coleman. "The point is, people who may not have the means to seek out an attorney when their students are having trouble in school can get help from our office."
In one of many policy shifts at OCR, the Trump administration quickly cut funding to Columbia and Harvard universities over allegations of antisemitism. Coleman says that until now, such cuts were considered "a last resort." In fact, federal law requires a lengthy back-and-forth with schools to bring them into compliance before any funding can technically be cut.
Smith says roughly 80% of her portfolio as a civil rights attorney was investigating complaints from students with disabilities or their families who felt their schools — K-12 through college — weren't providing the help they're required to by federal law.
"The Dallas office was the busiest office," Smith says. "We handled complaints from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. And those are all states where charter schools are strong. We had a lot of complaints from people who went to charter schools or parochial schools and said, 'Hey, these schools have taken our tax dollars, but they told me that they're not gonna serve or accommodate my child.' And so we had to right a lot of those wrongs."
As union president, Smith is still involved in meetings with the remaining OCR staff. "So now you see [attorneys] with caseloads of like 200, 250, 300 cases that they're trying to manage. And from what we're hearing, complaints aren't getting worked on, and it's not any fault of our colleagues who are left behind. It's because the work has just increased so much."
OCR's priorities have also shifted, with the Trump administration interpreting federal civil rights laws to justify going after schools that offer diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs or allow students to use facilities and play on sports teams based on gender identity.
Education Department officials disagree with the assessment that its obligations are not being met. In a press release announcing a new investigation into Oregon's Department of Education, the department's acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, said, "In the last six months, the Trump Administration has made historic strides in cleaning up the countless failures of the Biden Administration, including the prior Administration's dedication to gender ideology extremism. Oregon appears to have missed the message."
"What I've always found curious," Sheria Smith says of this shift, "is that an administration that campaigned on eliminating our agency to return rights back to the states is now saying states don't have the right to decide whether or not they want to actually protect their most vulnerable students."
Rachel Gittleman, Student Loan Ombudsman's Office, since 2023
Nestled inside the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA), the Education Department office responsible for managing the massive federal student loan system, is the Ombudsman's Office. There, civil servants, including Gittleman, help borrowers navigate the kinds of serious loan problems that a call or two to their loan servicer cannot resolve.
"We helped veterans access Total and Permanent Disability Discharge [of their loans]. We helped borrowers that had been misled by their schools," Gittleman says. "We helped borrowers in bankruptcy and borrowers in default gain access to affordable repayment plans. Basically, our job was to help borrowers, and their families, navigate incredibly difficult situations."
Like so many of her colleagues, after the March layoff announcement Gittleman immediately lost access to external email. "I had more than 400 open [student loan] complaints. … And I wasn't able to transition any of those borrowers because I wasn't able to access the system," she says.
"I felt all the same grief and devastation and heartbreak about losing my job, a job that I loved, a job that I found to be one of the most meaningful things I could do with my life."
Roughly half of FSA's staff have either been forced out or chosen to leave in the last six months, including staff in the office's vendor oversight team. Gittleman says that while she worked with borrowers to resolve individual crises, the oversight team "was responsible for systemic fixes to the system. Like, when you hear about credit reporting issues or bills being calculated incorrectly or bills not being sent to borrowers, things like that where it's affecting more than a handful of borrowers. … [the team members] have all been fully RIF'd and that work is just not being done."
The Trump administration insists it can still implement the ambitious changes included in Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill.
The Education Department recently outlined its rollout, with acting Undersecretary James Bergeron calling the bill "a historic win for students, families, and taxpayers," and its rollout announcement, "the first step in the implementation process, and we look forward to building the President's vision for education and training beyond high school."
But Gittleman is doubtful a cut-by-half student aid office can handle the scale of change.
"Even in the before times, even fully staffed, these changes would have been incredibly difficult," Gittleman says. "You fired the guts of the system, right? You fired the plumbing of the system — the people that make the system work."
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