Mass layoffs at Education Department signal Trump’s plan to gut the agency

The Trump administration on Tuesday slashed staff at the Department of Education – firing roughly 1,300 employees – as part of its long-planned effort to eliminate the agency entirely. The move leaves the department with 2,183 employees, down from more than 4,000 at the beginning of the year.

The cuts also follow recent leaks that President Donald Trump was planning to sign an executive order calling for the department’s dismantling, based on drafts first obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Although the president has broad executive authority, there are many things he cannot order by himself. And one of those is the dismantling of a Cabinet agency created by law. But he seems determined to hollow the agency out.

As an education expert, who has written and spoken widely on the push to privatize U.S. educational services, I see this latest effort as a residual campaign promise to abolish the department. It’s also part of the wave of executive actions creating legal and policy uncertainty around funding for children in local schools and communities.

The draft order, in 2 parts

On the surface, a demand to end the Education Department is nothing new.

Trump’s campaign platform included a call to abolish the department. It’s a call that literally began Project 2025’s education chapter as well.

What’s different now is Trump’s apparent strategy of doing what he can to eliminate the department on his own authority while seeking the congressional approval he legally needs.

The drafted new order has two parts that follow this logic.

The first directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to create a plan for eliminating whatever the administration can on its own. Under that section, McMahon is to pay special attention to any programs that might fall afoul of the administration’s earlier orders on diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI – initiatives.

The second part notes that these actions should follow existing law and administrative guidance. That amounts to an assertion of authority for Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.

Basically, it appears Trump is reminding everyone that he controls the Department of Education’s operational budget. At the same time, I believe he is implicitly calling on Congress to finish McMahon’s job by removing any lingering legal barriers to the agency’s final dismantling.

Whether Congress will do so is purely speculative, especially in the current political environment.

In 2023, a bipartisan majority of U.S. House members voted down a proposal to eliminate the Education Department. But Joe Biden was president then. He almost certainly would have vetoed any such bill that passed anyway.

It’s a different calculus to ask what the House would do under pressure from Trump. But even now, the Senate also gets its say. And it would take 60 votes to break any Democratic-led filibuster and eliminate the department.

A ‘final mission’

So, in one sense, a Trump order would just reinforce what he’s already done: gut agency staff and halt activity, while calling on Congress to finish the job.

But that brings the focus back to the first part of the order: directing the new education secretary to identify places in the department Trump can cut on his own – or at least transfer to other agencies.

As the March 11 mass layoffs show, it’s not even clear such a plan is needed for McMahon to try to begin dismantling the agency.

Even before these cuts, through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the administration all but froze a key piece of the Education Department: the Institute for Education Sciences, its nonpartisan research arm.

And on her first full day on the job, McMahon sent a directive to department employees calling the dismantling of their agency a “final mission.” To that end, the administration could decide to freeze hiring and some funding programs within the department.

The Trump administration tried a version of this with the federal Head Start program, which helps low-income families prepare their pre-K children for school. But it rescinded that plan in January alongside a pause on more general spending freezes across the federal government.

The March layoffs are telegraphing an extreme move: a wholesale decimation of the Education Department, as Musk’s team did to the U.S. Agency for International Development. That action effectively shut down most of USAID, with a plan to house what remains under the State Department.

Legal and policy uncertainty

Whether any such activities are legal, even under a Trump executive order, is another question.

They will all be challenged in court, adding to the flurry of lawsuits against the administration, many of which have prompted federal judges to pause Musk’s efforts in particular.

On March 13, two days after the Education Department cuts, 21 Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration over the layoffs, arguing they are “illegal and unconstitutional.”

Then the question becomes whether Trump’s team will even listen to any judicial demands to stop whatever plans they draw up for the Education Department. The administration is openly questioning such judicial authority. And in at least one instance – when ordered to release billions of dollars in federal grants – it has refused to comply.

In other words, a Trump executive order to dismantle the Education Department will create considerable legal and policy uncertainty.

It’s well known that Trump and allies want to eliminate the department and that he cannot do so legally without Congress.

The draft executive order seems to indicate that the Trump administration acknowledges those limitations – at least officially. But the draft order and the department’s mass layoffs raise the possibility that Trump might proceed anyway.

About the only thing clear at the moment is that billions of dollars in public educational programs across the country are at stake in the outcome of these decisions.

And the extent to which Trump’s latest directive has real consequences for that funding will be determined by the extent to which Congress voluntarily surrenders its own responsibility and authority in this space.

This article was updated on March 13 with news of the lawsuit against the Trump administration by 21 Democratic attorneys general.

Joshua Cowen is also a visiting senior fellow at the Education Law Center, a non-profit firm specializing in protecting public school resources and student access to high-quality public schooling. The opinions and analysis in this piece are his own.