The Trump administration took aggressive new steps on Tuesday to shut down the Department of Education. Through agreements with other federal agencies, the administration announced that it would give the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight of some of the Education Department’s key functions. HHS will oversee special education and rehabilitative services, while civil rights enforcement, student privacy protection, and training and advisory services will head to the Justice Department. These moves follow earlier partnerships that led to the relocation of more than 100 K-12 and higher education programs to external government agencies.
“The Trump Administration has been clear: as we scale back federal micromanagement when it hinders success, we are equally committed to bolstering the efficacy of federal oversight where it is essential,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. She added that the partnerships would “align federal responsibilities with the agencies best positioned to support them, strengthening the effectiveness and impact of critical services.”
But the announcement has elicited a loud outcry from disability advocates, civil rights groups, teachers’ unions and prominent Democrats. They have framed it as a betrayal of the vulnerable youth — among them the 7.5 million children covered by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — the Department of Education was created to serve.
Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington and vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, offered harsh words for McMahon in a statement about the plans to dismantle the Department of Education: “After spending months vowing she would protect students with disabilities, Secretary McMahon is ignoring the families of students with disabilities who pleaded with her not to entrust RFK Jr. with the responsibility of ensuring their kids get the education they deserve,” Murray said. “It makes zero sense to scatter federal education programs all over the government — with different agencies managing different educational programs and each of them lacking the expertise to do it.”
Why did this happen?
The efforts by the Trump administration to break up the Department of Education date back to his campaign promise to “move education back to the states where it belongs.”
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, called these efforts “illegal” and said the president took aim at the Department of Education “for no other reason than he thought it sounded good on the campaign trail.”
In March 2025, just months after returning to office, Trump signed an executive order to initiate the department’s elimination. Only Congress has the authority to close a federal agency, but the Trump administration is circumventing that by using interagency agreements to shift the department’s responsibilities elsewhere.
Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second term crafted by Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, recommends moving special education oversight and civil rights enforcement to other agencies. McMahon has also been consistent about her goal to “peel back the layers of federal bureaucracy” by partnering with agencies that she deems “better suited to manage programs and empowering states and local leaders to oversee the rest.”
The Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, known as OSERS, oversees about $15 billion in grants and state compliance with IDEA. The Office for Civil Rights investigates complaints of discrimination at schools and universities, upholding civil rights protections such as Title IX, a federal statute that prohibits sex discrimination in schools.
The Trump administration contends that moving education-related disability policy to HHS will improve coordination of services. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been accused of making harmful remarks about people with disabilities, stated that the partnership would “cut bureaucratic barriers, better align federal resources, and deliver more effective support for individuals with disabilities and their families.”
Similarly, the Trump administration says that relocating the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice will consolidate civil rights enforcement.
What happens next?
OSERS and the Office for Civil Rights will begin to turn over their duties, a process expected to be fraught with legal and logistical challenges. Trump administration critics say that other federal agencies can’t absorb the key responsibilities of the Department of Education without congressional approval. In December 2025, House Democrats wrote to the Department of Education urging it to stop trying to transfer programs covered by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, known as IDEA, to HHS because doing so would “violate congressional intent.” The lawmakers added that the Department of Education “remains the only federal agency with expertise, institutional knowledge, and established relationships with state and local education agencies to properly administer” these programs.
Last summer, however, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to continue gutting the Education Department as lower federal courts handled legal challenges. But the answer to whether the executive branch can reassign the functions of a federal agency without congressional approval remains unresolved.
Congress has not agreed to abolish the department or indicated that it will in the near future. In fact, earlier this year, lawmakers authorized a budget of about $79 billion for the Department of Education — the same as the previous year. Still, the Trump administration has effectively downsized the agency by reducing more than half of the Office for Civil Rights staff and shuttering many of the division’s field offices. This has led to serious consequences, namely the lack of resolutions to complaints involving sexual misconduct, racial harassment and discriminatory school discipline.
McMahon said she intends to get Congress to codify the offloading of the Education Department’s duties to other federal agencies. She told members of Congress in November that “when we have completed some of these transfers, that are working incredibly well, then we will be looking to Congress to codify those, make them permanent.”
How will this affect special education services?
Critics of moving special education out of the Department of Education and into HHS say the shift could reverse decades of progress. The Arc of the United States, a disability advocacy organization, warned that HHS “wasn’t built to replace the Department of Education’s school-specific expertise” and that giving it oversight of programs under the Individuals with Disabilities Act “pushes students with disabilities toward a medical model, where disability is treated as a diagnosis to manage instead of a natural part of human life.”
When such mindsets fuel education decisions, students with disabilities are more likely to be separated from the general school community, according to Robyn Linscott, The Arc’s director of Education and Family Policy. “IDEA belongs in an education agency because it is about classrooms, IEP meetings, behavior support, accessibility, and whether students can learn alongside their peers,” she argues.
In 1970, before the Department of Education existed, only one in five children with disabilities attended school. Since its 1979 creation, the agency has developed the specialized expertise to administer IDEA. While HHS has significant experience with disability services through programs such as Medicaid and the Social Security Administration, it does not have a history of protecting the rights of students with disabilities, let alone addressing their educational needs.
“HHS is not structured to provide that support and is already struggling to serve people with disabilities in its own domains of Health and Human Services due to the Trump administration’s severe staff reductions and program cuts,” said Carrie Gillispie, Early Development and Disability Project Director with the Education Policy program at New America, a left-leaning think tank.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, cautioned that giving HHS oversight of IDEA would leave students and families without the resources they need or the pathways required for them to hold educational institutions accountable. The move, she said, “puts students’ protections at serious risk and abandons families who rely on federal experts to navigate a complex system.”
Gillispie agrees, noting that the shift could make inter-agency coordination involving education programs more difficult. For example, about 12 percent of students with disabilities are English learners, and about half attend Title I schools serving economically disadvantaged children. Now, various federal agencies will administer these programs rather than the Department of Education alone. “Timely access to services for babies, children, and young adults with disabilities is now mired in a labyrinth of red tape,” Gillispie said.
How will this affect discrimination complaints?
The Office for Civil Rights’ move to the DOJ could make it harder for families to get a response to their discrimination complaints. Just as HHS doesn’t have a history of enforcing education-related disability protections, the Department of Justice does not specialize in investigating school-based discrimination. Moreover, as that agency experiences reductions in its workforce and policy changes, officials will have limited capacity to resolve complaints.
It’s On Us, a campus sexual assault prevention organization, issued a statement warning that the shift in oversight “will only exacerbate the challenges by giving an even greater caseload to the Department of Justice, showing a blatant disregard for student safety that will likely result in even fewer investigations being opened and completed.”
Although the Department of Justice has its own civil rights division, it is primarily a law enforcement agency. Families who file complaints must interact with prosecutors instead of educators. “Families didn’t ask for lawsuits. They asked for their children to be educated,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, a grassroots network of families working to influence K-12 education policy.
Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc and a former deputy assistant secretary in OSERS, is concerned about the relocation of both offices away from the Education Department. Students don’t experience discrimination in siloes, she said.
“A student who is denied services, disciplined for disability-related needs, or blocked from an accessible classroom needs one federal education system that can see the whole picture and act,” she continued. “Moving special education to HHS and civil rights enforcement to DOJ would split apart the offices responsible for making disability rights real in schools, leaving families chasing answers across the federal government instead of getting accountability from one education agency.”
Who supports the move?
Detractors of the Trump administration have fiercely criticized plans to rob the Department of Education of its key functions. But White House supporters have characterized the move as common-sense reform. Keri Ingraham, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative nonprofit focused on gender and economic policy, stated that downsizing the Department of Education will result in “reducing bureaucracy and improving efficiency without reducing services.”
Supporters also stress that since IDEA predates the Department of Education, students with disabilities will be protected under federal law regardless of which agency manages the program.
The Heritage Foundation praised the shuffling of the Education Department’s duties and the anticipated elimination of the agency. Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow in Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, said “integrating health policy and education policy for kids is smart” and that measures to end the Department of Education “are long overdue.”
