Decades ago, Congress guaranteed all students an equal opportunity to an education. But now the office created to enforce that promise has been decimated.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights was slashed in half on Tuesday as part of President Trump’s aggressive push to dismantle the agency, which he has called a “con job.” The firings eliminated the entire investigative staff in seven of the office’s 12 regional branches, including in Boston, Cleveland, Dallas and San Francisco, and left thousands of pending cases in limbo.
The layoffs struck every corner of the department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and supports programs for students with disabilities. But education policy experts and student advocates were particularly distressed about the gutting of the civil rights office, which fielded more than 22,600 complaints from parents and students last year, an increase of more than 200 percent from five years earlier.
Some voiced particular concern about what could happen to students with special needs, whose access to education is often left to the federal government to enforce. Many questioned how the Trump administration would be able to handle the office’s case load moving forward — or if it would at all.
“The move to gut this office and leave only a shell means the federal government has turned its back on civil rights in schools,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the office as assistant secretary for civil rights in both the Obama and Biden administrations. “I am scared for my kids and I am scared for every mother with kids in school.”
The Office for Civil Rights, established by Congress, opened along with the rest of the Education Department in 1980. One of the office’s first leaders was Clarence Thomas, now a Supreme Court justice. It is relatively inexpensive compared with other agency programs, with a cost of about $140 million in the department’s $80 billion discretionary budget.
The majority of civil rights complaints typically involve students with disabilities, followed by allegations of racial and sex-based discrimination. Many of the disability cases involve complaints that schools are failing to provide accommodations for students or that schools are separating disabled students from their peers in violation of federal law.
Mr. Trump and the education secretary, Linda McMahon, have maintained that staffing cuts at the department will not disrupt services for the 50 million pupils in elementary and secondary schools or 20 million college students.
But the only preparation the Trump administration announced before the layoffs was that the department’s Washington-based headquarters would be closed on Wednesday as a security precaution.
“We’ll see how it all works out,” Mr. Trump said of the layoffs while speaking to reporters at the White House.
Madi Biedermann, the Education Department’s deputy assistant for communications, said changes were underway in the civil rights office to process cases and praised the remaining staff members for their commitment and years of experience.
“We are confident that the dedicated staff of O.C.R. will deliver on its statutory responsibilities,” she said.
One civil rights investigator wept in an interview on Wednesday as she spoke about the abrupt firings and what they would mean for parents fighting for fairness for their children.
This investigator, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, had talked to parents on Tuesday morning about a possible resolution to a yearslong push to have their disabled son’s needs met at school.
In the afternoon, the investigator prepared a new case about a school retaliating against a Black student who had complained about racial slurs from classmates and reviewed an offer from another school to resolve a complaint from a student whose wheelchair had been repeatedly stuck — and occasionally tipped over — from crumbling walkways on campus.
In the evening, the investigator was fired. With work access cut off, there was no way to follow up with any of the parents she had spoken with that day, or to contact the witnesses she was scheduled to interview on Wednesday about a college student’s discrimination complaint.
“I was really trying to help, and now I can’t even talk to them, and I’m so sorry,” the investigator said. “I would never treat anyone like this. I would never just not show up or stop talking to someone, but I have no way to reschedule or let them know what’s going on.”
Disability rights advocates said that any impediment to the department’s ability to enforce civil rights laws would cause widespread harm to the nation’s education system.
Zoe Gross, the director of advocacy for the Autism Self Advocacy Network, said that she was particularly concerned about what might happen to the office’s data collection efforts, which have been used to spot potential red flags and identify trends.
For example, when some states reported zero instances of disabled students who had been restrained or separated from their peers, O.C.R. investigated and found that cases were not being reported because school officials had misinterpreted rules for disabled students. The federal government then intervened.
“All of these kinds of things you need the department to do and help with,” Ms. Gross said. “And without the Department of Education and the Office for Civil Rights, we’re going to see basically states left on their own to navigate that.”
Many of the office’s past cases have served as catalysts for broader change.
During the Obama administration, the office’s investigations into sexual assault and harassment identified more than 100 colleges and universities that were inadequately reporting and responding to allegations.
As a result, many schools adopted internal enforcement policies that have made it easier for students who have been sexually assaulted to receive large damage awards. These investigations have also been routinely referred to as validation for the collegiate #MeToo movement.
Sex-based cases also include harassment involving gender identity, an issue that fueled Mr. Trump’s campaign last year and motivated executive orders early in his administration aimed at preventing schools from recognizing transgender identities, barring transgender girls and women from competing on girls’ and women’s sports teams and terminating programs that promote “gender ideology.”
Restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic led to their own genre of discrimination complaints as schools closed, struggled to carry out online learning and then were slow to reopen.
Department officials said they still intend to pursue civil rights complaints and have discussed relying more on mediations as a way to quicken the pace of investigations, as well as other available legal tools to rapidly resolve cases.
The office had already moved to align with Mr. Trump’s priorities. It paused ongoing investigations into complaints of schools banning books and dismissed 11 pending cases involving schools that had removed books from their libraries. The cases primarily delved into issues of gender and racial identity.
Under the Biden administration, the office vigorously investigated complaints of racial discrimination amid the so-called racial reckoning in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd. Some complaints reflected the debate about schools’ roles in addressing systemic racism or charged that certain programming was exclusionary of non-minorities. Several longstanding diversity and inclusion efforts — which Mr. Trump has now ordered “illegal” and “harmful” — came under a microscope.
The civil rights office has also seen a rise in allegations of antisemitism, particularly on college campuses, and other religious-based discrimination. The Trump administration has supported those investigations, which they have used to strip federal funding from one university and threaten dozens more with similar consequences.
Before firing 1,315 employees on Tuesday, the Trump administration had already encouraged 572 workers to quit or retire early and had let go 63 employees who did not have union protections.
Taken together, 47 percent of the department’s work force had been eliminated in the first 50 days of Mr. Trump’s return to the White House.
Erica L. Green contributed reporting.
