On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to immediately stop the mass firing of federal employees during the government shutdown.
The Trump administration cannot issue any additional reduction-in-force notices, and it cannot enforce the notices already issued, according to the ruling from Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The temporary block follows a Sept. 30 lawsuit filed by two unions — the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — against the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for violating the law when OMB Director Russ Vought threatened a mass firing of federal workers during a shutdown.
For the second time this year, the Trump administration on Oct. 10 laid off a significant number of staff in the U.S. Department of Education, as part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to abolish the agency.
The first round of RIF notices at the Education Department came in March, leading the agency to get entangled in multiple lawsuits that challenged the legality of those firings.
Before Trump took office on Jan. 20, the department had 4,133 employees. In March, that dwindled to 2,183. The number of staff then dipped further to an estimated 2,000 after the Oct. 10 firings, which also impacted other federal agencies nearly two weeks after a federal shutdown began after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on the federal budget.
Meanwhile, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a X post on Wednesday that schools are operating as normal despite the government shutdown, which confirms that the U.S. Department of Education is “unnecessary.”
“The Department has taken additional steps to better reach American students and families and root out the education bureaucracy that has burdened states and educators with unnecessary oversight,” McMahon wrote. “No education funding is impacted by the RIF, including funding for special education, and the clean CR [continuing resolution] supported by the Trump Administration will provide states and schools the funding they need to support all students.”
K-12 Dive has compiled a timeline of events leading up to the agency’s latest round of RIFs and the continued downsizing of the federal education footprint.
-
March 11, 2025The Education Department announced a massive reduction in force, with plans to slash nearly half of its workforce, impacting all divisions within the federal agency — some “requiring significant reorganization,” according to McMahon.
The cuts, along with previously accepted employee “buyouts,” reduced the department’s headcount from 4,133 when Trump was inaugurated Jan. 20 to approximately 2,183 — affecting over 1,900 employees. -
March 12, 2025As part of the Education Department’s mass downsizing of its staff, the agency also shuttered seven of its 12 civil rights enforcement offices. The seven closed offices of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights oversaw half of the nation’s states, impacting nearly 60,000 public schools and over 30 million K-12 students.
The Trump administration also informed all seven Office of Educational Technology employees in an email that their positions and office were being “abolished” as the Education Department announced massive layoffs across the agency the day prior. -
March 20, 2025President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling on McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education,” marking the boldest push from the president to shut down the agency since its establishment under the Carter administration over four decades ago.
-
April 14, 2025A lawsuit was filed against the Trump administration over its significant downsizing of the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences in March. The lawsuit from the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness said the layoffs made it impossible for IES to carry out education research.
A similar lawsuit disputing the IES cuts was filed by the Association for Education Finance and Policy and the Institute for Higher Education Policy on April 4 in federal court. -
April 17, 2025Despite massive layoffs that left the Education Department with a skeleton crew in charge of administering and analyzing the Nation’s Report Card, the agency said the assessment will continue as planned in 2026.
-
June 18, 2025A federal judge ordered the Education Department to reinstate all laid-off Office for Civil Rights employees for the time being, saying the layoffs and shuttering of seven regional offices had rendered the remaining staff “incapable of addressing the vast majority of OCR complaints.”
-
July 14, 2025The U.S. Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to carry on with its efforts to lay off nearly half the Education Department’s staff as lower courts weigh in on the layoffs’ legality in New York v. McMahon.
-
July 15, 2025Management of key federal workforce development programs began shifting from the Education Department to the U.S. Department of Labor under an interagency agreement signed in May, both agencies announced.
-
Aug. 19, 2025Following a federal judge’s order directing that the Education Department be restored to “the status quo,” the agency said it plans to bring back more than 260 Office for Civil Rights staff who were cut as part of the March reduction in force, and it will be returning groups of employees to the civil rights enforcement arm in waves every two weeks from Sept. 8 through Nov. 3.
-
Sept. 29, 2025The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s order requiring the Education Department to restore the Office for Civil Rights to the “status quo,” which also allowed the department to move forward with plans to cut half of its OCR staff as litigation proceeds.
-
Oct. 1, 2025The federal government enters the first day of its shutdown as Congress remains at a funding impasse for fiscal year 2026. During the shutdown, the Education Department planned to furlough about 95% of its non-Federal Student Aid staff for the first week, according to a Sept. 28 memo from U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
The Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo a week before that threatened mass firings of federal employees if a government shutdown occurs, according to a Sept. 30 lawsuit filed by labor unions against OMB. -
Oct. 10, 2025The Trump administration issued reduction-in-force notices throughout the federal government, including at the Education Department where court filings show 466 Education Department employees were impacted by the layoffs. Most of the employees at the Office of Special Education Programs — where staffing had remained fairly stable — were laid off as part of the department’s second wave of RIF notices this year, according to several special education professional organizations.
The latest RIFs also reached Education Department offices that oversee civil rights, student achievement supports, budgeting services, school safety, postsecondary education and more, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing more than 2,700 Education Department employees. -
Oct. 15, 2025A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to cease any mass firings of federal employees initiated during the government shutdown. The temporary block came in response to a lawsuit filed by two federal employee unions against OMB over the office’s threats to initiate mass firings ahead of the Oct. 1 shutdown.
Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said the administration’s issuance of reduction-in-force notices to over 4,000 employees throughout the federal government during the shutdown is illegal, exceeds the administration’s authority and is arbitrary and capricious.
