The Trump administration is on track for sweeping changes to public education within the first 100 days of its second term but legal challenges await.
President Donald Trump has yet to issue an executive order to eliminate the Department of Education or work with Congress to do it, but the process of dismantling the smallest Cabinet-level agency is well underway.
Already half of the staff has been cut, along with $1 billion in contracts related to the department’s Education Sciences agency and diversity, equity, and inclusion training. Department offices outside of Washington will eventually be closed to save additional money over time.
Trump has also withheld federal education aid from universities that ignored his executive order banning campus diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and anti-Semitic policies. He warned states that the same could happen to K–12 school districts that continue to push progressive ideologies or allow boys to compete in girls’ sports.
Here’s what to know about what has happened 50 days into the new administration and what could lie ahead.
Layoffs and Contract Cuts
About 2,000 of the agency’s 4,133 employees have been laid off or voluntarily resigned, the Department of Education confirmed on March 11.
A Department of Education senior official told The Epoch Times on March 14 that the agency’s redundancies and inefficiencies included six separate strategic communications functions, office managers for teams of only five employees, and multiple support teams for information technology, human resources, and administrative support services that should have been consolidated into one central office per function.
The department had also announced that college finance, Title I funding for low-income K–12 students, special education coverage, and civil rights investigations related to learning institutions would not be affected by the cuts.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced last month that 89 multi-year contracts totaling $900 million for the Institute for Education Sciences will be cut.
More than a quarter of that amount, $226 million, had funded regional centers established to study the effectiveness of instructional materials and student outcomes. Instead, these offices promoted ideological agendas, including a research paper that stated, “There are too many white students in STEM,” according to a Feb. 19 statement from the Department of Education.
