Past secretaries, union leader call for probe into Education Department slashing

WASHINGTON — Three former U.S. Education Department secretaries and the union representing agency workers on Tuesday urged the department’s top watchdog to investigate the cost and impact of mass firings last year. 

Former U.S. Education Secretaries Arne Duncan and John B. King Jr., who led the department during the Obama administration, and Miguel Cardona of the Biden administration and Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, sent a letter including a formal request to Mark Priebe, acting inspector general of the Education Department. 

“We need a full picture of the fraud, waste and abuse carried out by this administration as they continue to play politics rather than doing their jobs to serve the American people,” Gittleman said at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol.

Democratic members of Congress and other labor leaders also spoke at the press conference, blasting President Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the 46-year-old Department of Education. The mass firings have marked a major part of that effort, which Trump tapped Education Secretary Linda McMahon to spearhead. 

“We may never be able to truly calculate the human cost of all of this, but we at least need to understand the financial cost to taxpayers,” Gittleman added. 

The department announced a reduction in force, or RIF, in March 2025. The U.S. Supreme Court in July 2025 temporarily greenlit those mass layoffs, along with Trump’s plan to dramatically downsize the agency, which he’d outlined in an executive order in March 2025. 

The RIF was delayed while a legal battle played out, but took effect in early August 2025 following the go-ahead from the nation’s highest court. 

Roughly 1,000 department workers were “unlawfully terminated or forced into retirement” that month, Gittleman said. 

The Tuesday letter also called into question another department effort in October 2025 to fire nearly 500 employees that was paused in court and stopped by Congress. 

Gittleman and the former secretaries are also asking Priebe to look into the cost and impact of “the subsequent reinstatements and rehiring of hundreds of employees” at the department. 

In response to the letter, a department spokesperson panned the secretaries’ records.

“It’s interesting that the Education Secretaries who brought you the failures of Common Core, the botched FAFSA rollout, and a campaign to redefine ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ are concerned about the Trump Administration’s efforts to reform a demonstrably broken bureaucracy,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to States Newsroom. 

The spokesperson defended the RIF, saying it was “implemented carefully and in compliance with all applicable regulations and laws.”  

They added that the agency “will continue our work to return education to the states and improve outcomes for our nation’s students.” 

Dems ‘fighting back’

U.S. Sens. Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee ranking member Bobby Scott of Virginia, as well as a handful of other Democratic lawmakers and union leaders, joined Gittleman outside the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. 

“The Department of Education’s stated mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access — since day one, Secretary McMahon has done everything possible to cause this mission to fail,” Alsobrooks said. 

Van Hollen noted that “we are fighting back, and we’re going to keep fighting back, and we’re going to prevail in the long run because they are trying to dismember the department piece by piece and then shut it down.” 

The administration’s sweeping steps to axe the department include more than a dozen interagency agreements that Education has signed with Health and Human Services, Labor, Interior, State, Justice and Treasury. 

The agreements seek to offload several of Education’s responsibilities to those departments. 

Scott said that the administration had been “illegally creating these interagency agreements, which are extremely inefficient and wasteful, and also result in inconsistent enforcement of federal education policy.” 

A Senate education panel in July advanced a bipartisan bill that would block interagency agreements that transfer programs regarding special education, elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education and Native American education. 

Earlier that month, a House education panel advanced a package that would greatly reduce the department’s responsibilities, standing in sharp contrast to the Senate measure.