You’re listening to Ed Brief, where we break down what’s happening at the U.S. Department of Education and why it matters to you.
The big headline this week: the Department of Education is sending home dozens of employees who were on the chopping block back to work to tackle a growing civil rights backlog, even as the administration continues its push to shrink and ultimately close the department. According to the Associated Press and local outlets covering federal workforce news, staff in the Office for Civil Rights who were targeted for layoffs are being reinstated to help investigate discrimination complaints from students and families. A department spokesperson, Julie Hartman, said the government will “utilize all employees currently being compensated by American taxpayers” while it continues to appeal lawsuits over the job cuts.
At the very same time, the department is moving aggressively to hand off many of its core programs to other federal agencies. In a recent press release, the department announced six new interagency agreements designed, in their words, “to break up the federal education bureaucracy” and move programs closer to other parts of government. Reporting from Education Week and EdNC explains that the Department of Labor will now manage most K–12 grant programs, including more than 20 billion dollars a year in funding, such as Title I money for schools serving students from low income families. Other programs are shifting to the Departments of Health and Human Services, Interior, and State, including grants for Native American education, campus child care, and international and foreign language studies.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon says these partnerships are about cutting red tape and aligning education with workforce needs. She recently said that by working with Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and State, the department will “refocus education on students, families, and schools” and make sure spending supports a world class education system. But a coalition of 20 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia has gone to court, arguing that federal law requires the Education Department to run its own programs and that the administration is using these agreements as a backdoor way to dismantle the agency.
So what does all this mean for listeners? For American families, especially those in schools that rely heavily on federal aid, the big questions are stability and accountability: who is actually in charge of making sure dollars arrive on time and civil rights are enforced when something goes wrong in a classroom. For businesses and nonprofits that partner with schools, shifting oversight to the Labor Department could tie education more tightly to workforce pipelines, potentially speeding up new apprenticeship and career programs but also changing grant rules and expectations. State and local education agencies may see streamlined communication with Washington in the long run, but in the short term they are navigating new points of contact, new systems, and legal uncertainty as the lawsuits play out.
Internationally, moving foreign language and international education programs to the State Department could deepen ties between U.S. campuses and global partners, but it also signals that these programs are being reframed as tools of foreign policy as much as education.
Here’s what to watch next. Courts will decide how far the administration can go in redistributing the department’s work without new action from Congress. The interagency agreements are already signed, but state lawsuits could slow or reshape implementation timelines. If you care about how this plays out, you can follow updates from your state attorney general, your state education agency, and the U.S. Department of Education’s newsroom, and you can contact your members of Congress to share how these changes might affect your local schools, colleges, or workforce programs.
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