A laid-off Department of Education employee claimed that workforce reductions at the agency would make it harder to support special needs students during a Wednesday MSNBC appearance.
The Department of Education announced it had cut 50% of its staff Tuesday between voluntary buyouts, terminating probationary employees and laying off bureaucrats in what is described as the initial phase in fulfilling Trump’s campaign promise to close down the cabinet department. Brittany Coleman, a civil rights attorney at the agency who also served as a shop steward for the American Federation of Government Employees prior to being laid off, told MSNBC host Ana Cabrera that “chaos” would result from the decision.
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“I will tell you that I think the impact is that they’re going to get the residuals of the chaos that we’ve been experiencing as employees,” Coleman said. “It’s hard to believe that removing functions and removing the people who do those functions, such as making sure that students receive their services if they have special needs, or making sure that there is adequate documentation of the students receiving those needs, how that eliminating their function is going to help the American public. It’s just unclear to me how removing Head Start or removing Title I funding through Black Grants, how any of that would be actually helpful in getting to the students who need it most.”
Earlier in the interview, Coleman criticized the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) over the layoffs. Coleman went on to claim that proposals to send block grants to the states lacked sufficient “oversight.”
“When you talk about removing that funding from our agency, we are the experts and we know how to administer that,” Coleman said. “We know how to help states be able to target that funding to make sure that it gets to lower income areas, whether that be urban or rural areas. And it’s — and it’s not clear that how that would actually be helpful.”
“What would be clear is that, you know, the process of moving that stuff is not going to assist states,” Coleman continued. “It’s actually going to hinder those efforts, because you’re not going to have the federal oversight that we give in order to make sure that that is being administered and that people are not being discriminated against based on federal non-discrimination laws.”
Trump said he wanted to move education “back to the states” during a Feb. 26 Cabinet meeting.
“We want to move education back to the states, where it belongs. Iowa should have education. Indiana should run their own education. You’re going to see education go way up,” Trump said. “Right now, we’re ranked at the very bottom of the list, but we’re at the top of the list in one thing: the cost per pupil.”
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