Education Dept. Isn’t Gone, but Staff Call It Inefficient
Eighteen months after President Trump ordered the U.S. Department of Education closed to cut bureaucracy and boost efficiency, the agency has not been dismantled. Instead, an NPR investigation published Sept. 24 found that the restructuring has cost taxpayers an unknown sum and made the department’s work more complex, and, by employees’ accounts, potentially less efficient.
NPR spoke with five Education Department employees, all of whom requested anonymity out of fear of professional repercussions. Four are among the hundreds of staffers now scattered across at least nine other agency buildings in Washington, D.C.
“A lot of the frustration we feel is from the fact that they came up with a solution for a problem they have not identified,” one worker said.
A department scattered, not shuttered
The administration has relied on interagency agreements (IAAs), long used to let federal agencies share resources, to shift whole programs and their staff to other departments. On March 26, the department had 10 IAAs with five agencies. By mid-June, six cabinet-level agencies were set to oversee Education programs, including more than 100 K-12 and higher education functions. The most recent major transfer hands the $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department.
This month, the special education office (OSERS) and the civil rights office (OCR) began their moves: over 100 special education staffers started reporting to a Health and Human Services building on Sept. 10, and dozens of civil rights employees shifted to the Justice Department.
Some members of Congress, including Republicans, have called the scope of the agreements “unprecedented.” Senate Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office to evaluate the costs, according to Jackie Nowicki, director of K-12 education research at the watchdog agency.
Getting money to students grows more complicated
Despite being the smallest cabinet-level agency, Education manages one of the largest pools of federal grants. Staff say the changes are making it harder to move that money out the door.
The office overseeing Title I grants, worth roughly $18.4 billion per year for schools serving low-income students, was moved to the Labor Department. The department has twice tried to use Labor’s systems to send Title I and other large grants; both attempts were halted after states pushed back, citing technical problems and a lack of trained staff. The next tranche of Title I money goes out Oct. 1 through Education’s own system, but employees say the department will try Labor again next year.
“Many of the students we serve are the kids that need extra support,” said one worker overseeing hundreds of millions in grants. “Personally, I’m very worried [about the money reaching those students] because they’re now going to be sending out funds through a challenging, complicated system.”
Some employees must now learn three separate grant management tools instead of one, and grant recipients face the same burden. The career and technical education grant, fully transferred to Labor last year, arrived months late for several states.
“It’s not efficient for us and it’s not efficient for them,” one staffer said. “This was done haphazardly.”
Bryce McKibben, a higher education policy expert at Temple University, said colleges and states relying on federal grants are struggling. “It all seems to be a very intentional effort to simply … make folks less likely to want federal funds in the first place,” he said.
Education Department press secretary Savannah Newhouse rejected the characterization, pointing to more than 7,200 payments totaling over $1.93 billion processed through Labor’s system since October 2025. “I’d hardly call [it] a ‘cautionary tale’ on inefficiency,” she wrote.
Costs of a ‘permanent’ move that may not be
The physical unwinding of the department is also coming at a cost, contrary to its public claims. In a March press release, the department said moving staff out of the Lyndon B. Johnson building would save about $4.8 million annually in operating costs, and that Energy’s move into the building would save over $350 million in deferred maintenance.
Two key costs were omitted. The LBJ building cannot accommodate Energy staff without a major overhaul, and House Republicans moved over the summer to free up $215 million for such a renovation. That overhaul would follow a yearslong LBJ renovation that began during the first Trump administration and was projected at $37 million in 2019; roughly $49 million has been spent since 2021, money spent consolidating Education staff into one place, the opposite of what is now happening.
Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, which represents department employees, said the department is paying for relocated workers to have up to three desks each, one at its current headquarters, one at its new headquarters and one at the agency where they are detailed. “This is a huge waste of taxpayer dollars,” she said. “This is not efficiency, this is chaos.”
The OSERS agreement with HHS runs until September 2027, but staff are detailed to HHS in renewable 120-day blocks. “So then what? Are we going to move again in 120 days? A year?” one employee said. “They have framed it as a permanent solution to our country and it’s not.”
A documented record of waste
There is already documentation of wasted spending. A GAO report released in February found the department spent between $28.5 million and $38 million from March to December 2025 paying staff not to work after layoffs. During that period, OCR resolved more than 7,000 discrimination complaints, but about 90% were dismissed without investigation.
Congress earlier directed the department to provide biweekly briefings on the agreements, including costs. Two congressional staffers said the department did not share cost information and stopped the briefings in June, after Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) proposed impeaching Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Newhouse said the department has continued to provide “significant updates” to committee members.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) has demanded transparency. “Tell Congress and the public what these interagency agreements actually cost taxpayers,” she said, adding: “Show us the receipts.”
What’s next
McMahon has defended the moves as a way to “streamline federal education activities,” and the administration maintains that funding itself is not being cut. But with the student loan portfolio heading to Treasury, special education at HHS and civil rights at DOJ, the department’s core functions are now spread across the federal government, even as officials insist the changes will produce efficiency.
A lawsuit challenging the interagency agreements is still working through the courts, and Democrats have introduced legislation to block them. Whether the department is ultimately closed or simply left hollowed out and harder to navigate, the employees NPR spoke with say they are staying because they care about its mission.
“I reported to a building this week that doesn’t say ‘education’ anywhere,” one staffer said.