Cuts have hit most of the department’s main functions, which include investigating civil rights complaints, providing financial aid, researching what works in education, testing students and dispersing federal funding.
President Trump’s order to dismantle the U.S. Education Department can move forward, the Supreme Court said on Monday, but the department has already been greatly diminished.
It is now about half the size that it was when Mr. Trump took office in January.
After the department started the year with about 4,000 employees, the administration fired some probationary workers and offered early retirement to other workers. The majority of cuts came in March when the administration announced plans to fire more than 1,300 employees. Since then, Linda McMahon, the secretary of education, has rehired only several dozen.
The layoffs hit nearly every corner of the department, including the Office of Federal Student Aid, which lost several hundred workers, and the Office for Civil Rights, seven of whose 12 regional offices were shuttered.
The department has continued to pay those fired workers and, under orders from a lower court, had found temporary office space in case the government needed to rehire former employees. The department had also spent the past month reaching out to fired workers to survey who was interested in returning to work and who had found other jobs.
There is a fundamental paradox to Mr. Trump’s push to close the department.
While vowing to limit the federal government’s role in schooling, he has used the agency’s remaining staff to shake the American education system from top to bottom, investigating colleges and schools and withholding billions of dollars.
Those investigations have scrutinized policies on gender, race and student protest that have been characterized as liberal.
