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The U.S. Department of Education may no longer be able to fully support students, according to an internal report that reveals the full extent of the Trump administration’s first round of state cuts.
The department lost about 40 percent of its staff from the day Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025, to March 31, 2025, but some sub-departments were hit harder, according to the report released last week. The English Language Acquisition Office, which served immigrant students, was gutted, leaving one employee, according to the report. The department also terminated contracts and grants totaling about $2 billion.
Although the report is internal, prepared by the Education Department’s Office of the Inspector General, it is incomplete. Department officials did not comply with all of the inspector general’s requests and canceled the interviews. As a result, the report says many of the key findings are not conclusive and that the total number of layoffs, the impact of those layoffs and the reasons for ending certain contracts and grants remain unclear.
The report also said that because of the cuts, the Education Department may no longer be able to administer dollars appropriated by Congress or oversee federal education law, including the distribution of financial aid, investigations in civil rights violations and data analyses.
“According to the Department of Education’s own inspector general, the rapid elimination of nearly 1,600 employees, including those responsible for teacher training, student mental health programs and legally required oversight functions, raises serious questions about whether the department can still meet its responsibilities to students,” said Kindra Britt, director of communications and strategy for California County Managers. “These are not bureaucratic losses; they have real consequences for real children.”
The report includes cuts only up to March 31, 2025, and since then the education department has continued to cut staff and end grants and contracts. A number of grants have also been reinstated due to lawsuits. The Trump administration has slowly shifted many education services to other federal agencies, including the US Department of Justice and the US Treasury. This year the only member of staff left to support English language learning was moved elsewhere in the department and the work was transferred to the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. This office is now managed in part by US Department of Labor.
“The Department of Education is focused on bringing education back to the states while preserving critical funding and cutting unnecessary red tape that can slow down support for students and families,” wrote Kirsten Beisler, assistant secretary of the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. “English learners should never be treated as an isolated program, set aside as an afterthought.”
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In a statement, Scott Roark, public information officer for the California Department of Education, said the state remains focused on helping students despite the administration's efforts to "disrupt services and safeguards" and "impose a national ideology on local schools." He said schools directly affected by these disruptions should contact the state education department for assistance.
Is the US Department of Education more effective?
Soon after taking office, Trump signed executive orders and directives that suggested ways to govern more effectively. The U.S. Department of Education, prompted by those orders, sent offers to all federal employees saying they could resign and remain on pay for several months. Later, in March 2025, the department began laying off workers.
The cuts are uneven across the Education Department's 17 offices, according to the inspector general's recent report: The Educational Services Institute, which conducts research, and the Office of the Undersecretary, which oversees many higher education programs, have lost more than 80 percent of their staff, as has the Office of English Language Acquisition. The 14 employees in the Office of Legislative and Congressional Affairs were untouched. The Office of the Inspector General is an independent entity and is not self-monitoring.
Whether these cuts have created any efficiencies is up for debate.
Sharon Bonney, CEO of KOABEa national organization representing adult learning programs said it primarily interacts with the Education Department's Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education, which lost about 30 percent of its staff in the first few months of 2025, according to the report.
"I haven't seen them miss a beat. I've seen more efficiency," Bonney said. "In the past I sent an email, it took three weeks to get a response, and now, two hours later, I have a response."
For Edgar Lampkin, CEO of the California Association for Bilingual Education, the effects have been "devastating."
California still struggles to serve its more than 1 million English language learners, far behind Texas in bilingual education and recent efforts to improve bilingual education in California have been received minimal attention or funding.
The Lampkin Association, along with the advocacy coalition Californians togetherhas long received federal grants, sometimes totaling as much as $1 million a year, to train bilingual teachers across the state. "Those subsidies are gone," he said -- and the Trump administration won't see the full impact of its actions, he added. "Effects of education are usually 10 years ahead."
This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.
