Education Department Reeling After Layoffs

Two weeks ago, the Education Department laid off half its staff in a historic reduction in force, the first step in the Trump administration’s plans to close down the department.

Inside Higher Ed spoke to more than a dozen former and current department staffers over the past week about the RIF and what followed. All of them describe a chaotic process that was “disorganized and unstrategic,” as one source put it, and say the cuts have led to technical mishaps, gaps in oversight and a large-scale loss of institutional knowledge. Most asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about their experience.

Multiple former and current staff say the department is struggling to fulfill its statutorily mandated responsibilities, from administering federal student aid to enforcing antidiscrimination laws.

“They don’t have the capacity to do their federally mandated work,” said a former staffer of over a decade. “When they say they do, they’re either lying or willfully ignorant.”

Administration officials themselves seemed to realize that at least some of the positions they eliminated were, in fact, essential. Last week dozens of employees who had been laid off received emails from the department’s chief human capital officer reinstating their employment.

“Effective immediately, the notice you received … regarding Reduction in Force is rescinded,” the email read, according to a screenshot shared with Inside Higher Ed and independently verified. “We are in the process of reactivating your accounts. Please report to your regular duty station.”

Multiple sources at the Office of Federal Student Aid confirmed that 50 employees at the agency who were originally laid off had their RIF notices rescinded; all of them worked in the agency’s tech office. A week earlier, the website for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid—the main software responsibility of the agency—had experienced nationwide service outages, preventing students and families from applying for aid.

Spokespeople for the department did not respond to a list of questions in time for publication. Former communications staff told Inside Higher Ed that’s no coincidence: The office was gutted, they said, and most external communications requests are going unanswered.

Remaining staff say the cuts have left them simultaneously overwhelmed with work and unable to do their jobs effectively. One staffer said that for the past two weeks, they have largely been cleaning up the mess left by the layoffs. Another said they’d been asked to take on the work of two former colleagues, but those colleagues had been shut out of their emails and were unable to help with the transfer.

“The mood is horrendous,” the staffer said. “Nobody knows what to do.”

‘Flying Blind’

Nearly a dozen former department staffers said that within 24 hours of receiving their RIF notices, they were locked out of their government email accounts, making it challenging to work for the remainder of their tenure and “nearly impossible” to help transition aspects of their roles they’d been asked to transfer to remaining employees.

One former staffer said that on the day of the RIF, she stayed late in the office to help walk a political appointee through “technical aspects” of a daily task that they “didn’t understand.” She was on the train heading home when the layoff notification hit her inbox; within hours, her email functionality had been frozen.

“Basically, we can’t do our jobs at all,” she said. “A lot of us have used our leave time for the last week because there’s no point in sitting around doing nothing and not being able to help anybody with anything, even transitional stuff that I had intended to do to help the remaining political team.”

Elizabeth Morrow, former deputy director of the Outreach, Prevention, Education and Non-discrimination Center at the Office for Civil Rights, said she also had access to her emails and files cut off immediately after receiving her RIF notice.

In the days after the RIF, Morrow said, she attempted to get a list of affected employees from the department’s human resources office but was told that the HR team did not have that information. She had to find out from a growing network of group chats for laid-off employees—on Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram—which of her colleagues had been let go.

“It’s hard to have continuity, or at least a transference of skills and institutional knowledge, when people don’t even know who’s left standing,” she said.

She worries that parts of laid-off staffers’ jobs that were essential to continuing statutory functions simply won’t be performed in their absence.

“They haven’t asked for any sort of assistance with passing on our institutional knowledge, how we did things, what our processes were, none of that,” she said. “There’s going to be a huge gap.”

Another laid-off staffer with nearly two decades of experience said that the lack of a transition will likely lead to headaches for the department down the line.

“Good luck to them,” he said. “They’ll be flying blind.”

Throwing Oversight Overboard

Morrow told Inside Higher Ed that one of the largest losses at the department was in oversight at OCR, fielding student and public complaints about discrimination and helping institutions navigate federal civil rights guidance.

“Clearly there will be a de-emphasis on complying with the law,” she said. “[Freedom of Information Act], privacy law, Title IX, Title VI. You name it, there will be less compliance and oversight.”

She said her team at OPEN helped direct communications with OCR from the public—teachers, students, parents, staff—as well as from local and national lawmakers who wanted to flag particular issues from constituents.

“We were the guardians of the OCR inbox,” she said. “I’m guessing there’s already thousands of emails backed up because we were all let go … When you don’t respond to someone’s complaint about discrimination and let them languish for months, that’s a real disservice and a violation of their civil rights.”

One former staffer at a regional School Participation Division said that because of the cuts, the department itself could lose out on “millions of dollars” in FSA liability payments—money owed back to the Education Department from colleges that misused or misspent Title IV funds.

Before the regional office in Atlanta was shut down, it had a significant number of reports in progress on colleges that were found liable for misuse of funds, she said. But laid-off staff have not been able to transfer those reports to employees at any of the five regional offices still standing.

“Our computer systems have been disabled, so we can’t even share the final reports,” she said. “It’s entirely possible that these liabilities will never be collected.”

The former staffer added that it would be a major challenge to farm out the offices’ responsibilities to other federal agencies like the Treasury Department—especially the role they played as liaisons to colleges seeking to comply with a higher ed regulatory environment that has grown increasingly complicated.

“These are certified public accountants who know the complex Title IV regulations. They’re very specialized,” she said, referring to many of her colleagues in the office. “I’ve heard it mentioned that other agencies might be able to do the work, but I don’t see how that’s possible. It isn’t like a regular [Internal Revenue Service] audit.”

Support Staff Decimated

Denise Joseph, a former management and program analyst with the Office of Postsecondary Education, was placed on administrative leave before the RIF over her involvement in DEI programming during the Biden administration.

She said she anticipated she’d be laid off when the time came but was shocked when her entire unit was let go. Her team was responsible for a combination of administrative assistance and human resources, addressing “competency gaps” and training employees on new systems and technologies to help them do their jobs better.

“Some staff had hundreds of thousands of grant applications to process,” she said. “Imagine if each one of a thousand grantees are contacting you for help. You really need to have good project management skills to do that job.”

Another former department analyst who was affected by the RIF said the Trump administration’s framing of the layoffs as “cutting waste” was disproved by the confusion and disarray that followed.

“The administration said they got rid of all the people at the department who didn’t directly work on things affecting the American people,” they said. “But I collaborated with staff across every single office. I helped them do their jobs better and more efficiently and adapt to emerging technologies and manage their growing caseloads.”

“Now there’s no one to support them.”