The New Yorker:

As Donald Trump guts the Department of Education, a vastly diminished staff attempts to keep the wheels on the government’s $1.6-trillion loan portfolio.

By E. Tammy Kim

On March 3rd, when Linda McMahon was sworn in to lead the Department of Education, she lauded its “momentous” and “historic final mission”: self-destruction. About a week later, she notified employees of a large-scale “reduction in force.” (President Donald Trump had instructed her to “do a great job and put yourself out of a job.”) Politico published an org chart that tracked the scope of the firings. Across seventeen pages, many divisions and subdivisions were shaded blood-red.

The Office of Civil Rights was slashed; hardly anyone is left to enforce anti-discrimination laws on behalf of students and parents in K-12 public schools. The Institute of Education Sciences went from nearly two hundred employees to about twenty, a worker told me; the move endangers a century and a half of data and research. The Office of English Language Acquisition, which provides grants to help students whose first language isn’t English, was completely wiped out. The entire Department of Education had only forty-one hundred employees to begin with, making it the smallest Cabinet-level agency by head count. (I gathered from interviews that it is a predominantly female workforce, which tracks with the demographics of K-12 school employees.) McMahon’s reduction in force brought that number to just under twenty-two hundred, she wrote in a press release. And further cuts are expected.

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