As the Education Department presses forward with handing off much of its remaining work portfolio and personnel to other agencies, former department secretaries and union officials are demanding greater transparency about the consequences of those efforts.
In a letter addressed to Education Acting Inspector General Mark Priebe, the American Federation of Government Employees — along with three former Education secretaries from the Biden and Obama administrations — called for a formal investigation into the costs of the Trump administration’s massive workforce and program cuts.
“This is waste. This is fraud. This is abuse,” the letter reads. “We ask for OIG to shed light where there has been vast darkness around the agency’s actions.”
The increasing pressure comes after the Education Department laid off nearly half of its career employees through a reduction in force (RIF) last year, combined with some voluntary separation incentives. The department’s headcount now stands around 2,000 compared to roughly 4,000 prior to the Trump administration.
AFGE Local 252, which represents Education Department employees, also assembled alongside House and Senate Democrats this week to urge the administration to halt the department’s dismantling.
“We may never be able to truly calculate the human cost of all of this, but we at least need to understand the financial cost to taxpayers,” Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, said Tuesday at a press conference outside the Capitol Building. “We know that behind every termination, every forced retirement or resignation, every dollar slashed, every office or program relocated, every policy decision is a story of a real human who is being harmed right now.”
Gittleman, one of the Education employees who received a RIF notice last year, pointed to hundreds of current Education Department job postings that seek to fill “the exact jobs our fired members were doing,” while accusing the department of refusing to hire former employees who were laid off in 2025.
“One of our fired members has been rejected multiple times from Education Department job postings that are identical to the job that she did while at the department. She was finally hired by a contractor to do the exact same job she did at the department for $15 an hour and without benefits,” Gittleman said. “She’s facing foreclosure on her home.”
Democrats who spoke at Tuesday’s press conference vowed that after the midterm elections, they would push forward with reversing the massive cuts to the Education Department.
“The next Congress, where I chair the Education and Labor Committee, we’ll get even more done,” Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), currently the committee’s ranking member, said Tuesday. “We’ll conduct vigorous oversight into the Department of Education. We’ll pass legislation to address equity in education and rebuild America’s schools. And we’ll be able to overcome this because we will be united.”
“We cannot just rely on good faith and handshakes. We have to codify legislation that makes sure the department is protected,” Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.) added. “This will be the only agency that is gone if we don’t do something about it … We have to make the entire caucus and country understand the work of the department, the people who facilitate that work and what it means to children, to communities and to our future.”
It would require congressional approval to fully dismantle the Education Department. But the department is already in the process of implementing more than a dozen interagency agreements to transfer major federal programs and personnel to other agencies across government.
The Justice Department will take on enforcement of civil rights in education, while the Department of Health and Human Services will oversee special education, administration officials announced in June. With those moves, the Education Department has now carved away the vast majority of its functions for other agencies to handle.
An Education Department spokesperson said the department’s RIF “was implemented carefully and in compliance with all applicable regulations and laws.”
“We will continue our work to return education to the states and improve outcomes for our nation’s students,” the spokesperson said in an email.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon is also facing an ongoing lawsuit from 21 state attorneys general over the Education Department RIF and efforts to shutter or transfer large portions of the agency’s work. After a preliminary injunction was issued in the case early last year, the Supreme Court later allowed the department to move forward with the mass layoffs.
On Monday, the plaintiffs filed a request calling for the Education Department to turn over about 1,300 documents related to the RIF that the administration has been withholding.
“These materials are central to understanding the decision-making behind defendants’ unlawful dismantling of the department,” plaintiffs wrote in their court filing.
The Education Department’s inspector general office reported in June that the workforce reduction efforts, as well as transfers and eliminations of agency programs, have led to the shuttering of some statutory, oversight and monitoring functions of the department.
“They are gutting the department. They are slashing funding. They’re driving out expertise,” Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) said at Tuesday’s press conference. “They’ve moved major responsibilities to other agencies under so-called interagency agreements without the support of Congress. They’ve diluted the expertise. That’s not more efficient.”
In July, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee advanced a bill, with bipartisan support, that would prohibit the Trump administration from shuttering or transferring functions of the Education Department. A pair of bipartisan House lawmakers introduced a companion bill earlier this month, which has been referred to the House Education and Workforce Committee for further consideration.
“You cannot sign an agreement that teaches the Department of Labor how to enforce a student’s civil rights. You cannot repost a job and get back 30 years of knowing how the money actually reaches the classroom — that’s expertise that walked out of the door, and every day it stays gone,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said. “Until Congress gets it right, until Congress brings these workers back … we are going to continue to fight.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
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