From the Hill
by Filip Timotija – 03/12/25 7:52 AM ET
Education Secretary Linda McMahon affirmed late Tuesday that mass layoffs are the first step toward shuttering the Education Department — a longtime goal of President Trump’s since his time on the campaign trail.
“Actually, it is, because that was the president’s mandate,” McMahon told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Tuesday. “His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we’ll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished.”
“But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat, and that’s not to say that a lot of the folks — you know, it’s a humanitarian thing to a lot of the folks that are there. … They’re out of a job,” she added in her interview on the “The Ingraham Angle.”
The department terminated almost half of its workforce — some 1,315 staffers — on Tuesday and will now only have about 2,183 employees left.
The overhaul of the workforce will not impact Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms, student aid, operations for students with disabilities, civil rights investigations and formula funding to states, a senior official said, adding the cuts were focused on unnecessary or reductive teams.
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