by The Supreme Court ruled Monday that President Trump’s plan to destroy the U.S. Education Department can proceed, but the department has already been significantly reduced.
When Mr. Trump took office in January, it was roughly half as large as it is now.
The management provided early retirement to some employees and sacked some probationary staff after the agency began the year with roughly 4,000 personnel. The administration revealed plans to lay off over 1,300 workers in March, which accounted for the majority of the reduction. Only a few dozen have been rehired by Education Secretary Linda McMahon since then.
Almost every department was affected by the layoffs, including the Office of Federal Student Aid, which lost several hundred employees, and the Office for Civil Rights, which closed seven of its twelve regional offices.
In addition to continuing to pay the sacked employees, the department had secured temporary office space under a lower court’s orders in case the government needed to rehire former employees. Additionally, the department had been contacting former employees for the previous month to find out if they were interested in going back to work or if they had found other employment.
The drive by Mr. Trump to shut down the department is fundamentally contradictory.
Despite his promises to curtail the federal government’s involvement in education, he has shaken the American educational system from top to bottom by using the agency’s remaining employees to investigate schools and colleges and withhold billions of dollars.
These inquiries have examined what have been described as liberal policies on student protest, gender, and race.
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