Trump’s moves to eliminate Department of Education are already having sweeping impacts

President Donald Trump is making good on his promise to dismantle the Department of Education, to the detriment of K-12 students across the country, advocates and experts say.

Trump signed an executive order March 20 directing the secretary of education to begin the process of winding down the department, arguing that its main functions “can, and should, be returned to the States.”

“Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” the Trump administration claims in the order. “The Federal education bureaucracy is not working.”

But if it were eliminated entirely, the effect would be an end to four decades of protections against discrimination that the Department of Education enforces through its Office for Civil Rights, experts say, and the elimination of a major source of funding for schools nationwide. State and local governments largely fund K-12 education, but the federal Department of Education allocates billions of dollars as well, including $18.6 billion in grants to disadvantaged schools and $14.1 million in grants for special education in the Biden administration’s fiscal year 2025 budget.

“It is incredibly alarming to see the sort of depth and breadth and viciousness of attacks on our public institutions in this administration, and also to see, you know, almost page by page, the agenda of Project 2025 being rolled out, which is something that we and many others had warned about as strongly as possible,” said Heather DuBois Bourenane, executive director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network.

The very first sentence of the 922-page right-wing blueprint’s chapter on the Department of Education argues that it should be completely eliminated. The chapter also argues that parents should be entitled to school vouchers funded by local and state governments, not the federal government, to pay for their children’s education.

The Trump administration can’t legally eliminate the Department of Education on its own. Congress would have to pass a bill dissolving the department, and Republicans are unlikely to get the 60 votes in the Senate required to overcome a Democratic filibuster, barring a change to the rules. But even before the executive order, it had already begun the process, says Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. 

Cowen, who called the order “window dressing,” said the real damage began weeks earlier, when the Trump administration began laying off federal workers by the thousands, including Department of Education staffers.

“It’s a press release with Trump’s signature on it,” Cowen said of the March 20 executive order. “Really, he can use a Sharpie to zero out whatever he wants on a piece of paper. But he does need Congress to eliminate the department, which they have acknowledged. But what they are already doing is, last week, they laid off half of the department staff, and that’s the big piece here.”

The Department of Education on March 11 initiated a reduction in force, which the federal agency says will result in more than 2,000 layoffs, or about 50% of its workers.

That reduction in workforce includes the elimination of multiple branches of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces federal civil rights protections in public schools.

The department is closing offices in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, leaving only the offices in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City and Seattle, as well as the Office for Civil Rights headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The closures will drastically impact the federal government’s ability to ensure that public schools are not violating students’ civil rights. Bourenane says that’s a huge problem.

“If we eliminate these safeguards and protections and simply allow states to treat children however they wish, without regard to these rights and protections, then we’re putting kids very literally at risk,” she said. 

Brian Dittmeier, director of public policy for the civil rights advocacy group GLSEN, spelled out in detail how harmful the loss of entire OCR offices could be.

“The whole process obviously includes filing a complaint and having a civil rights investigation if it’s opened, which requires staff to do the investigation and meet with the school district and figure out the heart of the matter of whether action needs to be taken to ensure not just the individual students, but all students in the district are able to learn free in an environment free from discrimination,” Dittmeier said. 

The loss of regional offices is key, he said. With the loss of an office in Chicago, for example, it becomes much more difficult for OCR staff to investigate civil rights complaints in neighboring states without their own offices.

“Many of these investigations require in-person visits to the school district, and particularly in the disability context as well, if you’re thinking about an ADA accommodation, you need to be able to see the actual width of an opening, or the slope of a ramp,” Dittmeier said. “And so if you’re removing those regional civil rights offices, it’s harder to actually get to the school and probably incurs more resources to the government to fly investigators to different school districts across the country.”

This will also ultimately result in a backlog in civil rights investigations, he said.

“What we saw over the last couple of years is record rates of civil rights complaints being filed with the Office for Civil Rights, which goes to show that there is a need for these investigations to be conducted,” Dittmeier said.

It isn’t just civil rights protections that will be affected by workforce reductions or the potential elimination of the department.

“The threat of the loss of federal funding is also incredibly serious, and this also is going to, I think, hit some of America’s red states the hardest,” Bourenane said. “I’m incredibly worried and concerned that people aren’t going to wake up to how bad these ideas really are until local kids really start feeling the pain. And we shouldn’t be running a political experiment that depends on whether or not our kids get hurt for us to pay attention.”

Cowen too said that the impacts of the potential end of the Department of Education will not be evenly felt.

”When the Trump administration says, well, we’re going to send education back to the states, it’s weird because of course, they say, Don’t worry, we’re not ending any public funding or services,” Cowen said. “They’re just sort of getting rid of the one organization that makes sure these dollars get spent the way they’re supposed to get spent. And I think that’s the take-home point here … if you live in a district that has lower levels of average income than compared to other districts in your state, if you live in a rural district, if you live in an urban environment that’s been historically under-resourced, if you live in a district with predominately Black children or Latino children, if your kid has a disability, if you’ve relied on a free lunch program at all at any point while your kids have been in school, all of these things are really open questions.”