WASHINGTON (States Newsroom) — Dozens gathered Friday outside the U.S. Department of Education to protest the ousting of more than 1,300 employees and President Donald Trump’s plans to dismantle the agency.
As the fate of the 45-year-old department hangs in the balance following the cuts this week, demonstrators held signs at a rally outside of the Education Department headquarters with slogans including “Educate Don’t Eliminate” and “WWE: We Want Education,” a reference to Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment background.
“These cuts — this isn’t just about a department and a building — this is about federal streams of money that help students live (up to) their full potential,” said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association, the country’s largest labor union.
“This agenda is about cutting funding and shipping it to private schools; it is about vouchers, make no mistake about it,” Anderson said. “It is about dismantling public education so that children cannot get what they deserve.”
Trump has repeatedly pledged to shutter the agency, and McMahon confirmed this week that the sweeping cuts marked the first step in that process.
The president alone does not have the authority to close the department, and such an effort would need congressional approval.
‘Fight back’
Following a “honk-a-thon” on Independence Avenue, Sen. Mazie Hirono told the crowd that Trump and billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk “think that they can take a chain saw to government agencies, and they’ve been slashing and burning and firing thousands of people for no cause, and just recently, of course, they got to the Department of Education.”
Trump and Musk have taken significant steps to reduce federal government spending and go after what they see as waste, with the Education Department marking a major target of those efforts.
“But we are all here to fight back because this is no time to be sitting back thinking that other people are going to fight the battles for us,” the Hawaii Democrat said. “No, we are in it together.”
The rally came as department leaders announced this week that they would be cutting a substantial number of the agency’s staff, prompting concerns over how the department could carry out its responsibilities when roughly halving its workforce.
The layoffs make huge cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, Office of Federal Student Aid and Institute of Education Sciences, among other units, according to the nonprofit Education Reform Now, which advocates for more resources for education.
Fulfilling responsibilities
Some of the department’s many responsibilities include administering federal student aid, enforcing civil rights cases, providing Title I funding for low-income school districts and guaranteeing a free public education for children with disabilities via the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.
Through a spokesperson, the department said Thursday its core responsibilities would not be impacted by the cuts.
But protesters Friday worried about the path to dismantling the department.
Molly Cronin, a special education teacher in Virginia, told States Newsroom that “if IDEA is not protected, if Title I is not protected, if Head Start is not funded, our most vulnerable children are going to be failed by the system, and we have a duty as educators to protect all students.”
Cronin, a member of the National Education Association who serves on the board of her local union, said one of the biggest misunderstandings about the agency “is that people think that the federal department is in control of the states and states’ curriculum and programs and all of that, when, in fact, that’s not true.”
Trump has vowed to shut down the department in his quest to move education “back to the states,” despite much of the funding and oversight of schools already occurring at the state and local levels. Legally, the federal government cannot control the curriculum of schools.
Legal challenges to the sweeping cuts are already taking shape, after 21 Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration Thursday over the efforts.
Prior to the mass layoffs, the department already witnessed dramatic downsizing in the weeks since Trump took office, with major contract cuts and staff buyouts.
Cuts make mission harder
Antoinette Flores, who worked for the Education Department during the Biden administration, said she knows many of the people harmed by the layoffs.
“These are colleagues, these are friends, these are dedicated public servants that help students, and it’s devastating to see what’s happening.”
Flores, who focuses on higher education, told States Newsroom the massive cuts are “going to make it much more challenging for students to receive grants and loans that they’re entitled to.”
Rather than go after inefficiencies in the federal government, as Trump and Musk have said is their goal, Flores said a smaller federal workforce would actually “increase fraud, waste and abuse.”
