Education Dept Staff Expected To Be Slashed By Half As Trump Mulls Closing It

Education Department staff have been told not to come into work on Wednesday as speculation swirls about whether President Donald Trump will shutter the department.

All offices will be temporarily closed for “security reasons” starting Tuesday evening, and staff are instructed to take their laptops with them and leave their office buildings at 6 p.m., according to a memo sent to all Education Department employees.

Also, “reduction in force” notices for Education Department staff are expected to go out at 6 p.m., and nearly half the department is expected to be eliminated, according to Semafor.

The office buildings are scheduled to reopen on Thursday, but the move is reportedly an unusual one for the department.

The memo to staff comes as the Trump administration mulls shutting down the Education Department. Last week, the draft of a potential executive order closing the department circulated.

The draft would direct Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Education Department” to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”

“The experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars—and the unaccountable bureaucrats those programs and dollars support—has failed our children, our teachers, and our families,” the draft read.

Also last week, McMahon sent an email to staff promising to “send education back to the states,” saying Trump and the American people had “tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of the bureaucratic bloat here at the Education Department—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly.”

The department has already placed dozens of its around 4,500 staffers on leave. It also recently terminated over $600 million in grants for training teachers in “divisive ideologies” including social justice activism, anti-racism, and recruiting teachers based on race.

Closing the department would follow through on a key campaign promise that was met with cheers on the campaign trail.

“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,” Trump said at a September rally in Wisconsin. “We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.”

Frustration with public schools reached a boiling point over the last several years. During the pandemic, parents pleaded with schools to open the classrooms and stop requiring face masks on children. After COVID, parents lashed out over crippling learning loss, schools hiding children’s gender identity changes, and teachers pushing controversial ideologies like Critical Race Theory.

Meanwhile, critics have pointed out that the Education Department doesn’t do much educating. Though it spends $80 billion in taxpayer dollars each year, it has no say over public school curriculums, which are decided at the state and local levels. Instead, it doles out $18.4 billion annually for Title I, the low-income school district program, and $15.5 billion for special education. It also enforces certain Title IX civil rights laws and sets the rules for colleges to participate in the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program.

If the department is closed, its key functions would likely be transferred to other agencies — the civil rights office could be moved to the Justice Department, and the student loan program could be moved to the Treasury Department.