The Schooling Division is transferring forward with plans to dismantle most of its operations, even after Congress agreed to extend its price range and rejected the Trump administration’s calls to maneuver key applications to different businesses.
Final fall, the division signed a number of interagency agreements transferring lots of its workers and applications to the departments of Labor, Inside, State, and Well being and Human Companies.
These interagency agreements will transfer billions of {dollars} in grant applications to different businesses. The Labor Division, specifically, will oversee federal funding that goes to Okay-12 colleges, together with grants for colleges serving low-income communities.
As soon as this switch is full, the Labor Division will disperse extra training funding than it does for its personal labor applications.
Congress just lately handed a spending bundle that elevated funding for the Schooling Division, rejecting the Trump administration’s requires deep price range cuts to mirror lots of its core applications being moved elsewhere.
However officers say it’s nonetheless transferring forward with plans to switch extra workers and applications out of Schooling.
Schooling Division Press Secretary Savannah Newhouse mentioned in an announcement that the fiscal 2026 appropriations invoice “does not preclude the department from partnering with better-positioned federal agencies to manage federal education programs.”
“We will continue to deliver successes through these partnerships, further solidifying the proof of concept that interagency agreements provide the same protections, higher quality outcomes, and even more benefits for students, grantees and other education stakeholders,” Newhouse mentioned. “We look forward to working with Congress on the next steps to codify these partnerships.”
Former Schooling Division workers and training nonprofits say different federal businesses aren’t geared up to tackle this extra work, and that makes an attempt to dismantle the Schooling Division have already led to confusion and better prices.
Augustus Mays, the vice chairman of partnerships and engagement on the nonprofit EdTrust, advised Democratic lawmakers at a listening to final week that the Schooling Division is anticipated to maneuver out workers and applications “in the coming weeks,” regardless of restrictions within the spending invoice signed by President Donald Trump.
“By fragmenting programs and sending them to agencies that do not do core functions of educational services to districts and schools, we are now seeing cities, school districts and states will have to navigate multiple agencies and go unaware of the funding status of those particular funding streams because they’re at different agencies,” Mays mentioned.
“As funding shifts into systems and agencies not built for education, we’re obviously going to see bottlenecks that will arise,” he added.
Final month, lawmakers accredited $79 billion in discretionary spending for the Schooling Division, a rise of greater than $200 million in comparison with spending ranges for fiscal 2025.
Against this, the Trump administration proposed chopping the division’s discretionary spending by $12 billion.
The four-bill spending bundle that funds the Schooling Division via September 2026 consists of language that bars lined businesses from utilizing funds in any method that “relocates an office or employees,” or “reorganizes programs or activities.”
Schooling Secretary Linda McMahon advised workers final November that the division’s interagency agreements would reassign workers to different businesses “on a temporary basis.”
The Schooling Division can’t dismantle operations with out approval from Congress, however its leaders count on a brief reorganization would give the Schooling Division a proof of idea to point out lawmakers.
Home Schooling and Workforce Committee Rating Member Bobby Scott (D-Va.) mentioned the Schooling Division is offloading its core duties to different businesses “through legally dubious interagency agreements.”
“Over and over again, the administration has circumvented the law to hamstring the future of public education without the consent of Congress or the American people,” Scott mentioned.
Ashley Harrington, senior coverage counsel on the NAACP Authorized Protection Fund, advised lawmakers that not one of the businesses taking on work for the Schooling Division have the mandatory staffing or experience to distribute training grants.
“Many of the departments and staff were already gutted by these illegal reductions in force, and now they’re trying to send them to agencies that also don’t have the resources, either the internal knowledge or even just the staff itself to manage these programs. So absolutely, this is increasing bureaucracy and increasing difficulty, not improving it,” Harrington mentioned.
About 20% of the Labor Division’s workforce accepted voluntary separation incentives final yr. Harrington mentioned the Labor Division and different recipients of Schooling Division applications don’t have the IT infrastructure to course of the amount of funds that the Schooling Division oversees.
“At best, these changes would just add more layers of bureaucracy and more red tape between schools and the federal funding that Congress has promised them,” she mentioned.
Harrington mentioned the interagency agreements haven’t made Schooling Division workers on element extra environment friendly. She mentioned these workers are “doing the same job, but in a different chair.” In some instances, the businesses they’ve been transferred to aren’t prepared for them.
“They can’t actually get in the building. They can’t use the Wi-fi. There’s little ways this is inefficient. Bigger ways as well, because they’re eventually going to have to switch grant management systems. They’re going to have to learn a whole new program. The grantees are going to have to learn a whole new program. There’s going to be a lot of money spent to create those systems,” she mentioned.
A federal court docket in Massachusetts briefly blocked the Schooling Division from continuing with its reorganization plans final yr. However the Supreme Court docket stayed the decrease court docket’s preliminary injunction, permitting the division to proceed with plans to dismantle the company.
Rachel Homer, director of Democracy 2025 and senior lawyer at Democracy Ahead, beforehand served as chief of workers for the Schooling Division’s Basic Counsel Workplace. She mentioned the switch of workers and applications out of the Schooling Division goes towards what Congress enacted into legislation.
“These transfers through the [interagency agreements] — they’re illegal. That’s not what Congress has set up. That’s not how Congress has instructed the agencies to function,” Homer mentioned.
A latest report from the Authorities Accountability Workplace discovered that the Schooling Division spent as much as $38 million to maintain lots of of Workplace of Civil Rights workers on paid administrative go away. Company officers tried to fireside them, however had been blocked by a federal court docket. The division ultimately rehired them.
Ray Li, a former lawyer within the Schooling Division’s Workplace of Civil Rights, now coverage counsel with the NAACP Authorized Protection Fund, mentioned his former workplace hears from the scholars and their households about allegations of discrimination primarily based on intercourse, race, nationwide origin or incapacity.
After main cuts to the Workplace of Civil Rights and the closure of seven of its 12 regional places of work, Li mentioned many college students and households have had their instances “abandoned and left without recourse to combat discrimination.”
Between March and September 2025, OCR acquired greater than 9,000 instances of alleged discrimination. OCR resolved greater than 7,000 of these instances. However 90% of them had been resolved via dismissals previous to investigation.
“They were already dealing with an agency that wasn’t equipped to fully handle all of the complaints that were coming in, due to funding constraints and staffing constraints, and so there are long delays in having their complaints heard. Now, those delays are doubled, tripled, or in many cases, they’re hearing radio silence,” Li mentioned.
The Schooling Division despatched reduction-in-force notices to almost 500 workers throughout final yr’s authorities shutdown. The division just lately rescinded these RIF notices, however Harrington mentioned many reinstated workers are usually not again at their outdated jobs.
“Most of them have been brought back, but they’ve been shuffled around in a way that they’re not doing their same jobs, or they’re part of some of these new interagency agreements and being detailed to different agencies. So it still doesn’t look the same,” she mentioned.
Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Authorities Staff Native 252, mentioned in an announcement that McMahon “is unlawfully dismantling the Schooling Division by transferring places of work to different federal businesses regardless of a transparent warning from Congress that she lacks the authority to take action.
“This isn’t efficiency — it’s a direct threat to the tens of millions of students who rely on the Department to safeguard access to quality education and to the taxpayers who depend on federal oversight to prevent waste. Dismantling the Education Department and scattering its responsibilities will only create confusion for schools and colleges, erode public trust, and harm students and families,” Gittleman mentioned.
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