MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
We begin this hour with the latest on the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Late yesterday, the administration announced sweeping layoffs. Between those cuts and the hundreds of veteran staffers who have agreed to leave voluntarily, the Education Department will soon be roughly half the size it was two months ago, cut from around 4,100 to around 2,200. For more on those cuts and how they may play out across the country, let's bring in NPR's Cory Turner. Hey there.
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Who are the workers losing their jobs?
TURNER: Well, you know, while just about every office in the department lost staff, I think it's important right now to focus on the handful of offices that were hit especially hard. One of them is the Office for Civil Rights. These are largely attorneys that are based all over the country. And they field complaints from families and parents who say, hey, a school discriminated against my child because of their race, sex or disability. Now, according to internal department data obtained by NPR, at least 240 employees in the Office for Civil Rights were laid off, most of them attorneys. I spoke earlier today with Catherine Lhamon. She ran the Office for Civil Rights under both the Obama and Biden administrations, and she called these cuts devastating.
CATHERINE LHAMON: Cutting the office by more than half is an absolute walk away from our longstanding bipartisan commitments to civil rights and our belief that every one of our kids is a valuable learner.
TURNER: It's also worth pointing out, Mary Louise, the Trump administration has said it wants to crack down on campus antisemitism. But to do that now at these staffing levels, it will almost certainly require deprioritizing some other discrimination claims.
KELLY: Another thing to ask you about, Cory - the federal dollars that schools get from the Education Department, which specifically help kids in low-income communities, also kids with disabilities.
TURNER: Yeah, so that money, provided by law, will still flow to schools. But several sources told me the administration has fired most of the experts who help states and school districts understand how they can and cannot spend that money. So these are also the attorneys who say, hey, you're breaking the law. Don't do that or you could lose your federal funding. You know, these layoffs essentially allow states to keep receiving federal funds while limiting the U.S. government's ability to offer guidance or guardrails to guarantee that this money is being used to help the kids it was meant to help.
KELLY: But what are the people making these cuts, either at the Ed Department or at the White House, what are they saying in their defense?
TURNER: So President Trump himself was asked about them earlier today. He said a few things. One, he repeated something he has said many times now, that he wants to return education to the states. This is a big Republican talking point. He called it a dream of his. He also said this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: When we cut, we want to cut, but we want to cut the people that aren't working or not doing a good job. We're keeping the best people.
TURNER: The problem with that, Mary Louise, is I am right now looking at a spreadsheet of nearly a thousand Education Department employees who were fired and the jobs they did. And these layoffs were the opposite of a thoughtful, case-by-case, person-by-person thinning based on past performance. They cut people in large groups with nothing in common but the kind of work that they were doing - again, civil rights enforcement, education research. I spoke with one person in the student loans office. They told me, through these cuts and buyouts, the office of Federal Student Aid has lost many of its best and most productive people.
KELLY: A basic question, Cory, are these cuts legal?
TURNER: We don't know, Mary Louise. That is the question. I've spoken with several government and legal experts who say they certainly push at the edges of what's legal because the law is pretty clear that only Congress has the power to eliminate programs it created. But then, is cutting department staff in half tantamount to eliminating programs? I think lawsuits are inevitable. The courts could step in. But what comes of all this? I have no idea.
KELLY: NPR's Cory Turner. Thanks, Cory.
TURNER: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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