Federal Workforce Archives

President Donald Trump’s order to reduce the U.S. Department of Education by half will improve education, give parents more resources, and save taxpayer dollars, says one congressman, who noted the greatest opposition comes from teachers unions and “Marxists who hate faith, family, free market, education.”

Department of Education (DOE) employees were told to leave their offices by 6 p.m. Tuesday night and not to report to work on Wednesday, as DOE offices remained closed and locked.

The reduction in forces reduces the total number of employees at the Department of Education from 4,133 to 2,183. Of those let go, 313 accepted buyouts and 259 came as part of the deferred resignation program. Former employees will be placed on administrative leave starting next Friday, March 21 and will receive full salary and benefits until June 9, with severance pay afterwards. The move will close seven of the DOE’s 12 satellite offices, affecting the cities of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

“That’s the way the real world works,” Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) told “Washington Watch” Wednesday night. “What we’ve had with the Department of Education since [the 1970s] is a terrible return on investment. Our kids have been dumbed down. We’ve been made to be more divisive. We don’t have the pride in our country — no connection with our Founding Fathers, and a God Who actually had His hands all over our nation.”

“If our children are trained to be ignorant, we’re going to lose our culture. It’s just a matter of time,” said Owens. With President Trump’s decentralizing actions, “We have a chance to reset this for generations to come.”

The firings may bring real taxpayer savings, experts say. At the DOE, “86 employees were making an average salary of $201,374; more than 1,000 employees were making between $167,603 and $195,200; and more than 1,000 were making between $142,488 and $185,234, according to Tommy Schultz, CEO of the American Federation for Children, a school choice advocacy organization.

Teachers unions and Democrats reacted to the layoffs with fury.

“Authoritarian Republicans have chosen to attack and demean our BIPOC, immigrant, and LGBTQIA+ students” with “white-washed history cloaked as ‘patriotism,’” said St. Paul (Minnesota) Federation of Teachers President Leah VanDassor. “Fascist regimes always start by targeting the most vulnerable populations.” In fact, fascist regimes rely on public education to indoctrinate impressionable students in their logically untenable ideologies.

“Dismantling the Department of Education” is “simply about taking away resources from our public schools,” claimed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D).

“I’m really angry about this!” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told MSNBC about the department’s impending closure on Saturday. She claimed the administration plans to make DOE unable to work, and “reading programs, the computer programs, the after-school programs” will “go away … [I]f the funding goes away, a kid doesn’t get physical therapy or occupational therapy.”

On Tuesday, Weingarten also posted her “solidarity” with the Chicago Teachers Union, which has closed struggling Chicago schools five times in the last 13 years.

“Firing half of the staff so that the Department of Education cannot function will jeopardize the resources, programs, and protections that give millions of students the opportunity to succeed,” said the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor union. The 12-million-member coalition returned to familiar Democratic talking points, accusing the Trump administration of “pushing a Project 2025/DOGE agenda.”

The backlash was expected, because unions “prioritize mediocrity instead of meritocracy,” Owens remarked on “Washington Watch.” Re-empowering local communities “will help your child to really thrive. You now have the funds to do it, because they’re not being wasted here in D.C.,” he said. “We the People can do much better without funding than having it for folks here in D.C., who have a totally different agenda and different priorities than most parents have in their in their hometowns.”

Owens noted the role of federal education bureaucracy in foisting a divisive social agenda on the nation’s children. “The reason why we’re having this conversation about men in sports and men in girls’ bathrooms [is] because of the Department of Education. The focus is totally different; it’s an ideology” promoted by “Marxists who hate faith, family, free markets, and education.”

The move begins the process of fulfilling President Trump’s campaign promise to close the Department of Education, which has had a contentious history since its founding during the Carter administration. Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a leaked administration document showing the president aims to close as many functions of the DOE as possible and transfer their control, and funding, back to the states, until Congress passes legislation closing the department altogether.

“Ready to bid farewell to the U.S. Department of Education?” asked Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), a conservative opposed to the existence of DOE on constitutional grounds.

“The president’s mandate, his directive to me, clearly is to shut down the Department of Education,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday night. “We know we’ll have to work with Congress to get that accomplished. But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat.”

“We’re not taking away education,” said McMahon. The president is instead “taking the bureaucracy out of education, so that more money flows to the states.”

If education returns to the state level, “10 states won’t be perfect, five states will be probably not so good, but they will be every bit as good as Norway, and Denmark, and Sweden, and all of the states that are rated near the top,” said President Trump last Friday. He told Secretary McMahon upon her confirmation one day earlier, “I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.”

The most recent test results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed reading scores falling for fourth and eighth grade students in U.S. public schools. Eighth graders also saw their math scores decline since 2022. All students remained below pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

“When you think about high school students who are graduating, only 30% are reading proficiently,” McMahon noted.

Although federal education funding accounts for only about one-tenth of state and local education funds, it often comes with ideological strings. The Biden-Harris administration attempted to force local school districts to admit males into female showers, locker rooms, and sports events or lose education funding. Republicans foresee federal funding replaced with block grants controlled and managed by the states.

Education experts agreed the president’s mass layoff will not harm the quality of U.S. education. “Nothing about the U.S. Department of Education is essential, by design,” noted Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Education Freedom. “Constitutionally, education is reserved to the people and states.”

“For a generation, our nation’s education system has been held hostage by bureaucrats and schooling unions who care only about preserving their own power, not the needs of American students. During that time, the Department of Education has ballooned in size while our students have fallen further and further behind,” said Schultz. “This news is another signal that the bureaucratic state is coming to an end in America.”

“Better education is closest to the kids with parents, with local superintendents, with local school boards,” McMahon told Ingraham. “I think we’ll see our scores go up with our students [when] we can educate them with parental input, as well.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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A federal judge’s ruling has allowed President Donald Trump to continue his purge of a major government agency, firing thousands and placing thousands more on leave. As of Monday morning, nearly all U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) employees have been placed on “administrative leave” and at least 1,600 have been informed that they are going to be fired.

A notice on the USAID website reads, “As of 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 23, 2025, all USAID direct hire personnel, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and/or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative leave globally.” The notice continues, “Concurrently, USAID is beginning to implement a Reduction-in-Force that will affect approximately 1,600 USAID personnel with duty stations in the United States.”

The Trump administration has been attempting to gut USAID for weeks, initially placing employees on leave for trying to skirt presidential directives, and quickly moving to firing almost the entire agency workforce. In response to a lawsuit filed by federal workers’ unions, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) halting the mass firings. Nichols, who was appointed to the federal judiciary by Trump himself in 2019, explained at the time that issuing a TRO did not mean he would ultimately agree with the unions filing the lawsuit.

On Friday, Nichols removed the TRO, rather than extending it. He explained that the unions “have not demonstrated that further preliminary injunctive relief is warranted.” Nichols wrote, “Upon scrutiny, the employment-related injuries that plaintiffs assert here are not irreparable ones warranting the ‘extraordinary remedy’ of a preliminary injunction.” Although USAID employees — particularly those stationed abroad — claimed that they would be barred from accessing agency systems necessary to their safety, Nichols found upon reviewing the evidence that this claim was unsubstantiated. He said that evidence provided by the Trump administration had “convinced the Court that plaintiffs’ initial assertions of harm were overstated.” The judge concluded, upon detailed review of testimony and documents submitted to him, that USAID employees’ concerns would be best addressed by review boards established by Congress to resolve labor and personnel disputes within the federal government.

The mass firing of USAID employees comes as Trump advisor Elon Musk, who developed the idea for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has demanded that federal employees submit reports on their productivity or face termination. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk announced that “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.” He added, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” According to CBS News, federal employees have been given until Monday night to respond to the email, sent by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), with five bullet points listing accomplished tasks, excluding classified information.

Democrats have responded to the required productivity reports with vitriol. Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) called on federal employees to ignore the email. “This is a good opportunity for mass civil disobedience. Musk has no authority to do this,” Casten wrote on X. He continued, “Encourage all federal employees to report to work, prepare GFY letters and continue to demonstrate the public service and patriotism he lacks.” The acronym “GFY” stands for “go f*** yourself.” Senator Tina Smith (D-Minn.) also launched a vulgarity-laced tirade against Musk, replying to the productivity report directive by saying, “This is the ultimate d**k boss move from Musk — except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a d**k.” Musk noted that the “bar is very low here,” observing that an email with five bullet points “take less than 5 mins to write.”

However, even some Trump administration officials have directed federal employees to ignore the email from Musk and OPM. According to The New York Times, federal employees at the FBI and the U.S. Departments of State, Defense, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security have been instructed not to respond to the email. In most cases, the order to ignore or disregard the email was issued by a senior official in the corresponding agency, but both National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Director Kash Patel ordered employees under their supervision not to respond. Spokespersons for numerous federal agencies publicly stated that the heads of those agencies are responsible for reviewing and evaluating the work of employees.

Gabbard told intelligence community officers not to reply to the email due to “the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work…” Patel likewise told FBI employees to “pause any responses” to the email, further explaining, “The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures.” Darin S. Selnick, who is performing the duties of the Defense Department’s Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness, said in a public statement, “The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reported over the weekend, though, that he will see to it that even senior military commanders are fired if they refuse to follow orders or implement the president’s agenda. He said that former president Joe Biden “gave lawful orders. A lot of them are really bad. And it’s unfortunate how they eroded our military.” Hegseth continued, “President Trump has given another set of lawful orders. And they will be followed. If they’re not followed — and all these orders are in keeping with the Constitution and norms inside the military — if they’re not followed, then those officers will find the door.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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USAID Workers Fired as Elon Musk Looks for Progress Reports

S.A. McCarthy