Now that the Education Department can proceed with laying off much of its staff, some higher-ed experts are concerned about the potential ramifications for financial aid, grant funding, and civil-rights enforcement.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the agency could go ahead with mass layoffs affecting around 1,300 employees. The department had 4,000 employees in 2024; including the roughly 700 staffers who have accepted buyouts, the Trump administration has cut the work force in half.
The court’s 6-3 ruling overturned a preliminary injunction that had halted the job cuts. The layoffs are being challenged in court by 20 states that argue the layoffs prevent the department from fulfilling its legally mandated functions.
“The U.S. Department of Education will now deliver on its mandate to restore excellence in American education,” the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, said in a statement after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
With layoffs moving forward, questions about how the Education Department will continue its core work have become more urgent. The department handles data collection, the disbursement of federal grants and aid, and the investigation of civil-rights violations. That last role is one that President Trump has capitalized on in his crackdown on what the administration has called rampant antisemitism on college campuses.
For Rebecca S. Natow, an associate professor of specialized programs in education at Hofstra University, the word that best describes the future is “uncertainty.” “Higher ed doesn’t like uncertainty,” she said. “Higher ed doesn’t like surprises.”
Here are three key questions about what comes next for the Education Department. (The department itself did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.)
Will there be more layoffs?
Secretary McMahon and other Trump administration officials have said they aim to eliminate the department entirely, but they acknowledge that formally doing so would require Congress to act. So far, the executive branch’s approach has been to shrink the department as much as possible.
McMahon said in her Monday statement that the “reduction in force to promote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most — to students, parents, and teachers” — would be carried out promptly.
However, employees who were laid off from the agency’s Office for Civil Rights are still being reinstated, per a June 18 ruling from a federal judge. That’s because they’re involved in a separate lawsuit filed by the Victim Rights Law Center.
Melanie Storey, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said a smaller work force is cause for concern at a moment of big changes for higher-ed policy — including to student loans, endowment taxes, and Pell Grants. “While we’ve heard a lot from them that they are committed to delivering on their obligations, it is unclear how they plan to do that,” Storey said about the agency.
In March, the Education Department fired and then quickly rehired some financial-aid staffers in essential technical roles.
Will other government agencies start assuming the department’s duties?
On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced that the Department of Labor would step in to administer adult education, family literacy programs, and career and technical education programs.
Trump officials have said that the Office for Civil Rights’ caseload would likely be handled by the Department of Justice, while enforcement of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act could fall to the Department of Health and Human Services. They have floated the Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department as potential managers of the agency’s sprawling $1.7-trillion student-loan portfolio.
But Patrick McGuinn, an associate professor of political science at Drew University, said some of these agencies “already have their hands full.” He said it’s just “an administrative shelf game,” where the shifting around of different duties might not go as smoothly and instead cause disruptions in the agency’s services.
“It’s easy to sort of parody the bureaucrat, right?” added McGuinn, who is also a senior research specialist at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. “But at the end of the day, you need people at the IRS to process tax returns. You need people in the Department of Ed to make sure that the checks get issued to the right place at the right time.”
Will financial aid and federal grants get out the door as planned?
Whether federal money, in the form of financial aid and grants for institutions, will be doled out on time is a chief concern for higher ed. It’s a particularly sore subject after last year’s botched rollout of a new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which left some students in limbo as they awaited months-late aid offers.
“These things are just not computer-generated and automatically happen. There are people that have to oversee those processes,” said Emmanual A. Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education.
Colleges typically get their government funding for financial aid in one big deposit at the start of a semester. Any delay could prove challenging for small private institutions that rely on that money to keep the lights on.
Many colleges “live paycheck to paycheck, and their biggest paycheck is when tuition money comes in,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and head of its department of educational leadership and policy studies.
Guillory is also worried about the future of other grant programs handled by the department, such as funding for TRIO and GEAR UP, which received $1.2 billion and $388 million, respectively, in fiscal year 2024.
The dismantling of the Department of Education has been a talking point in conservative circles since it was created in 1979, but no attempts have come to fruition, McGuinn said. “Nobody really likes federal micromanagement, federal mandates, federal regulations,” he added. “But states and localities love the federal money itself.”
