(The Hill) — Education Secretary Linda McMahon affirmed late Tuesday that mass layoffs are the first step toward shuttering the Education Department — a long-time goal of President Donald Trump’s since his time on the campaign trail.
“Actually, it is, because that was the president’s mandate,” McMahon told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Tuesday. “His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we’ll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished,”
“But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat and that’s not to say that a lot of the folks, you know, it’s a humanitarian thing to a lot of the folks that are there… They’re out of a job,” she added in her interview on the “The Ingraham Angle.”
Department of Education lays off nearly half of workforce
The department terminated almost half of its workforce — some 1,315 staffers — on Tuesday and will now only have about 2,183 employees left.
The overhaul of the workforce will not impact Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms, student aid, operations for students with disabilities, civil rights investigations and formula funding to states, a senior official said, adding the cuts were focused on unnecessary or reductive teams.
“But we wanted to make sure that we kept all of the right people and the good people to make sure that the outward facing programs … the grants, the appropriations that come from Congress, all of that are being met, and none of that’s going to fall through the cracks,” McMahon said Tuesday evening.
The news of the workforce cuts came after the department told workers to leave their offices Tuesday by 6 p.m. EDT and that they would be closed on Wednesday because of “security reasons.”
The administration’s goal to completely eliminate the department cannot happen without Congress’s approval, where a 60-vote backing would be required to sidestep the filibuster.
McMahon warned workers of the upcoming layoffs in the “final mission” memo she sent out after she was confirmed for the leadership position by the Senate. In it, she argued that “removing red tape and bureaucratic barriers will empower parents to make the best educational choices for their children.”
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McMahon also said Tuesday that the administration is not “taking away education” and that it will eventually lead to students scoring higher on tests.
“He’s taking the bureaucracy out of education so that more money flows to the states. Better education is closest to the kids, with parents, with local superintendents, with local school boards,” the secretary said.
“I think we’ll see our scores go up with our students and we can educate them with parental input as well,” she added.
But the move will not go down without a fight. Education advocates are now preparing to defend the federal agency through litigation and civic action while the president readies an expected executive order seeking its elimination.
