Congress fully funded Education Dept, but it’s moving ahead with reassigning employees to other agencies

The Education Department is moving ahead with plans to dismantle most of its operations, even after Congress agreed to increase its budget and rejected the Trump administration’s calls to move key programs to other agencies.

Last fall, the department signed several interagency agreements transferring many of its employees and programs to the departments of Labor, Interior, State, and Health and Human Services.

These interagency agreements will move billions of dollars in grant programs to other agencies. The Labor Department, in particular, will oversee federal funding that goes to K-12 schools, including grants for schools serving low-income communities.

Once this transfer is complete, the Labor Department will disperse more education funding than it does for its own labor programs.

Congress recently passed a spending package that increased funding for the Education Department, rejecting the Trump administration’s calls for deep budget cuts to reflect many of its core programs being moved elsewhere.

But officials say it’s still moving ahead with plans to transfer more employees and programs out of Education.

Education Department Press Secretary Savannah Newhouse said in a statement that the fiscal 2026 appropriations bill “does not preclude the department from partnering with better-positioned federal agencies to manage federal education programs.”

“We will continue to deliver successes through these partnerships, further solidifying the proof of concept that interagency agreements provide the same protections, higher quality outcomes, and even more benefits for students, grantees and other education stakeholders,” Newhouse said. “We look forward to working with Congress on the next steps to codify these partnerships.”

Former Education Department employees and education nonprofits say other federal agencies aren’t equipped to take on this additional work, and that attempts to dismantle the Education Department have already led to confusion and higher costs.

Augustus Mays, the vice president of partnerships and engagement at the nonprofit EdTrust, told Democratic lawmakers at a hearing last week that the Education Department is expected to move out employees and programs “in the coming weeks,” despite restrictions in the spending bill signed by President Donald Trump.

“By fragmenting programs and sending them to agencies that do not do core functions of educational services to districts and schools, we are now seeing cities, school districts and states will have to navigate multiple agencies and go unaware of the funding status of those particular funding streams because they’re at different agencies,” Mays said.

“As funding shifts into systems and agencies not built for education, we’re obviously going to see bottlenecks that will arise,” he added.

Last month, lawmakers approved $79 billion in discretionary spending for the Education Department, an increase of more than $200 million compared to spending levels for fiscal 2025.

By contrast, the Trump administration proposed cutting the department’s discretionary spending by $12 billion.

The four-bill spending package that funds the Education Department through September 2026 includes language that bars covered agencies from using funds in any way that “relocates an office or employees,” or “reorganizes programs or activities.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon told employees last November that the department’s interagency agreements would reassign staff to other agencies “on a temporary basis.”

The Education Department can’t dismantle operations without approval from Congress, but its leaders expect a temporary reorganization would give the Education Department a proof of concept to show lawmakers.

House Education and Workforce Committee Ranking Member Bobby Scott (D-Va.) said the Education Department is offloading its core responsibilities to other agencies “through legally dubious interagency agreements.”

“Over and over again, the administration has circumvented the law to hamstring the future of public education without the consent of Congress or the American people,” Scott said.

Ashley Harrington, senior policy counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told lawmakers that none of the agencies taking over work for the Education Department have the necessary staffing or expertise to distribute education grants.

“Many of the departments and staff were already gutted by these illegal reductions in force, and now they’re trying to send them to agencies that also don’t have the resources, either the internal knowledge or even just the staff itself to manage these programs. So absolutely, this is increasing bureaucracy and increasing difficulty, not improving it,” Harrington said.

About 20% of the Labor Department’s workforce accepted voluntary separation incentives last year. Harrington said the Labor Department and other recipients of Education Department programs do not have the IT infrastructure to process the volume of payments that the Education Department oversees.

“At best, these changes would just add more layers of bureaucracy and more red tape between schools and the federal funding that Congress has promised them,” she said.

Harrington said the interagency agreements haven’t made Education Department employees on detail more efficient. She said those employees are “doing the same job, but in a different chair.” In some cases, the agencies they’ve been transferred to aren’t ready for them.

“They can’t actually get in the building. They can’t use the Wi-fi. There’s little ways this is inefficient. Bigger ways as well, because they’re eventually going to have to switch grant management systems. They’re going to have to learn a whole new program. The grantees are going to have to learn a whole new program. There’s going to be a lot of money spent to create those systems,” she said.

A federal court in Massachusetts temporarily blocked the Education Department from proceeding with its reorganization plans last year. But the Supreme Court stayed the lower court’s preliminary injunction, allowing the department to proceed with plans to dismantle the agency.

Rachel Homer, director of Democracy 2025 and senior attorney at Democracy Forward, previously served as chief of staff for the Education Department’s General Counsel Office. She said the transfer of employees and programs out of the Education Department goes against what Congress enacted into law.

“These transfers through the [interagency agreements] — they’re illegal. That’s not what Congress has set up. That’s not how Congress has instructed the agencies to function,” Homer said.

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office found that the Education Department spent up to $38 million to keep hundreds of Office of Civil Rights employees on paid administrative leave. Agency officials tried to fire them, but were blocked by a federal court. The department eventually rehired them.

Ray Li, a former attorney in the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, now policy counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said his former office hears from the students and their families about allegations of discrimination based on sex, race, national origin or disability.

After major cuts to the Office of Civil Rights and the closure of seven of its 12 regional offices, Li said many students and families have had their cases “abandoned and left without recourse to combat discrimination.”

Between March and September 2025, OCR received more than 9,000 cases of alleged discrimination. OCR resolved more than 7,000 of those cases. But 90% of them were resolved through dismissals prior to investigation.

“They were already dealing with an agency that wasn’t equipped to fully handle all of the complaints that were coming in, due to funding constraints and staffing constraints, and so there are long delays in having their complaints heard. Now, those delays are doubled, tripled, or in many cases, they’re hearing radio silence,” Li said.

The Education Department sent reduction-in-force notices to nearly 500 employees during last year’s government shutdown. The department recently rescinded those RIF notices, but Harrington said many reinstated employees are not back at their old jobs.

“Most of them have been brought back, but they’ve been shuffled around in a way that they’re not doing their same jobs, or they’re part of some of these new interagency agreements and being detailed to different agencies. So it still doesn’t look the same,” she said.

Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, said in a statement that McMahon “is unlawfully dismantling the Education Department by moving offices to other federal agencies despite a clear warning from Congress that she lacks the authority to do so.

“This isn’t efficiency — it’s a direct threat to the tens of millions of students who rely on the Department to safeguard access to quality education and to the taxpayers who depend on federal oversight to prevent waste. Dismantling the Education Department and scattering its responsibilities will only create confusion for schools and colleges, erode public trust, and harm students and families,” Gittleman said.

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