Inside the Education Dept. Purge

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In this episode

Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, an agency that Republicans say is too wasteful and too woke. Through a series of layoffs and buyouts, the Trump administration has reduced the agency’s work force by roughly half. The broader goal, administration officials say, is to return more power to the states and to cut down on government waste. But the cuts have left many people concerned about the department’s capacity to carry out its vital functions, like enforcing civil-rights laws. The great purge at the agency has spread fear among employees, upended hundreds of lives, and left some to conclude that the whole point of this operation has been to intimidate and control government workers.

Related Reading:

• ‘Breathtakingly Irresponsible’: Former Workers Decry Decimation of Education Dept.’s Data Warehouse
• What the Education Dept.’s Job Cuts Could Mean for Financial Aid
• Protesters Rally Against Education Dept. Cuts

Guests:

• Anthony Badial-Luna, management and program analyst at the Education Department
• Kaitlyn Vitez, higher-education liaison at the Education Department
• Christopher Madaio, former director of the Investigations Group in the Education Department’s enforcement unit; senior adviser at the Institute for College Access & Success
• Elizabeth Morrow, a deputy director at the Office of Public Engagement for Non-Discrimination in the Office for Civil Rights

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from The Chronicle.

In the furious first days of Donald Trump’s second term as president, confusion and fear spread through the U.S. Department of Education. The relatively small federal agency, headquartered in southwest Washington, had a big target on its back. Trump had campaigned on a promise to eliminate the department, making good on a long-held Republican goal to dismantle the federal education apparatus. Now, he had the power to deliver.

Trump is hardly the first politician to take aim at the agency, which conservatives describe as both too wasteful and too woke. Established by Congress in 1979, one of the department’s key responsibilities is to distribute more than $100 billion in student financial aid through Pell Grants and loans. It is also higher ed’s proverbial cop on the beat, investigating corrupt colleges and enforcing civil rights regulations.

Trump wants it gone, and that plan starts with getting rid of many of its people. Through a series of layoffs and buyouts, the administration has reduced the department’s workforce by roughly half, purging about 2,000 people from the agency. These actions, which are being challenged in federal court, have fueled concerns about the department’s ability to carry out its vital functions. They have also left hundreds of people unemployed and uncertain about their personal futures.

Today on the show, we’ll take you inside the great purge of the U.S. Department of Education, as told by the people going through it.

Anthony Badial-Luna I graduated from the University of South Carolina and then I decided to move to Washington D.C. on a whim. I mean, maybe it was a little crazy to do such a thing, but I had faith. But yeah, I loaded up a U-Haul and I moved here. I just started applying to federal jobs on USAJobs.gov and I just wanted to serve in public service.

Jack Stripling That’s Anthony Badial-Luna, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran. After graduating from the University of South Carolina in 2024, Badial-Luna struck out on his own to Washington. He had experienced first-hand the benefits of the federal financial aid program, which provided him with Pell Grants to complete bachelor’s degrees in biological sciences, as well as criminology and criminal justice. Living in a rented apartment in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va., he arrived with no connections to family or friends. But he had a vision of a better life and a fresh start.

Anthony Badial-Luna I really just, you know, wanted to serve, you know, public service. You know, finding a nice stable job and trying to make a difference, helping people, that was the dream. I can’t really see anything beyond that. I didn’t really plan anything beyond that. This is where I wanted to be, you know?

Jack Stripling: This past winter, that plan started to come together. On January 12, eight days before Trump’s inauguration, the young man who’d grown up in Lima, Ohio started his first big government job. The title wasn’t sexy: Management and Program Analyst. But it meant that Badial-Luna would work in the Office of Federal Student Aid, helping simplify the process by which students got access to federal money for college.

Anthony Badial-Luna So coming from a small town, a poor community, being a minority, you don’t really think there’s many options that you can achieve all that much. But to me, it’s crazy where I ended up, you know, to get that acceptance letter and just to make it through the military, come out with two bachelor’s degrees was, I still can’t believe that I accomplished so much.

Jack Stripling That excitement proved to be fleeting, though. As a probationary employee, Badial-Luna was particularly vulnerable to the coming purge. Most if not all employees start as probationary, a sort of trial period with fewer job protections. On February 12, with just a month on the job, he began to realize that something was wrong.

Anthony Badial-Luna I worked the day, eight hours. After my shift, I was working remote, but you know I was scrolling through like social media and I see on Reddit that people are losing access to their government-issued laptops. They’re locked out, they’re blocked, they can’t log in. So I was like curious. I was like, maybe I should try mine, right? And sure enough, I am also locked out. So I kind of knew, you know, yeah, I probably got that termination email. It was pretty terrible, I couldn’t sleep that night. I didn’t know what to do. So, I wake up to an email from my supervisor. It says, call me with their number listed. I call them, and they’re telling me that they were CC’d in an email with a termination letter attached for me, saying that I was being removed from my position immediately. And then my supervisor doesn’t… they didn’t know it was coming. They had no idea. And then they emailed me the termination letter in my personal email.

Jack Stripling His termination notice arrived on Department of Education letterhead. The letter read in part, quote, “The agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the agency would be in the public interest.”

I asked Badial-Luna if he had received any kind of feedback, negative or positive about his performance before receiving this letter.

Anthony Badial-Luna I did not. No. I didn’t even have a performance plan.

Jack Stripling So what do you think of the notion that the letter that you received said that this was about your performance?

Anthony Badial-Luna It was a lie.

Jack Stripling The dismissals of probationary federal employees like Badial-Luna are now being fought over in federal court. That’s left him and others in a precarious position, placed on administrative leave, but still vulnerable to an eventual dismissal. That feeling of uncertainty has in many ways defined the experience of education department employees over the past several months.

Well before the mass layoffs, education employees were on edge. The Department of Government Efficiency, the unit led by Elon Musk and known by the acronym DOGE, set up shop in the education department’s main building and began identifying places to cut. Among those who lost jobs, sources told The Chronicle of Higher Education, were all but three of the 100 employees working in the National Center for Education Statistics. The center collects and analyzes education data, which many educators and policymakers see as a vital function that informs sound policy decisions. One departing education department staff member, who asked that College Matters not reveal his name for fear of retribution, said DOGE’s presence in the Education Department created paranoia among staff — and that that appeared to be the point. The source told us, quote, “They want you to feel like you’re being watched all the time. The question there is, well these are public employees, they should be watched. But intimidation is different than accountability, and this really felt like intimidation.”

This unnerving feeling is something Kaitlyn Vitez said she felt from the start of Trump’s second term.

Kaitlyn Vitez I think at first people were just nervously awaiting whatever the next marching orders would be, whether we would be able to communicate openly with people. But I think pretty quickly folks’ attentions turned to navigating the rapid de-staffing of the agency through a variety of means, and so people were very spooked by the wave of administrative leave notices that staff received for participating in DEI programs.

Jack Stripling Vitez served as the higher ed liaison in the education department’s communications and outreach office. In that role, she was something of a translator. She helped colleges and associations to better understand the sometimes-arcane nuances of federal policies and pronouncements. If a college had a question about what a new policy meant, she was often the person to help get an answer. But Vitez, along with about 1,300 of her colleagues, was forced out in March through the administration’s massive layoff action. Layoffs, pressured retirements, and probationary dismissals effectively shut down her entire division, a seven-person unit of outreach and communications professionals. Vitez worked in her role for three years, mostly during Joe Biden’s presidency. Early this year under the Trump administration, she sensed immediate changes. Her office was told to slow down its communications with colleges and other groups, she said, and people at or near retirement age were feeling enormous pressure to retire early. The most glaring change, though, was that Vitez’s colleagues started to disappear. This was all part of the Trump administration’s war on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. At the direction of The Office of Personnel Management, DEI office staffers in the Education Department and elsewhere in the government were placed on administrative leave. In conjunction with that directive, the Trump administration ordered federal workers to report on any of their colleagues who might be quietly working on DEI activities, lest they face “adverse consequences.” Former employees told me that the DEI dragnet was extremely broad. It included people who might have participated in a DEI training years before — even during President Trump’s first term. Vitez described the DEI initiative as confusing and unnerving.

Kaitlyn Vitez It was chilling, and at first, people didn’t realize why they were being put on admin leave. And so there was confusion about whether it was being done on an individual basis or because they had participated in a training. So it took some time for people to understand their individual circumstances. And even now there’s some people on admin leave that haven’t gotten answers on when or how they’ll be able to return to work.

Jack Stripling The Trump administration’s focus on diversity programs sent a signal to the department: The enemy had a name, and it was DEI. That message troubled Christopher Madaio, who was at the time director of the investigations group in the enforcement unit at the Department of Education. In his time at the department, Madaio had pursued what he considered to be truly bad actors in higher education. The investigations unit’s job was to go after high-pressure, predatory colleges that misled students about the cost of programs and future job prospects. During his tenure, their work resulted in significant penalties against colleges: Florida Career College was barred from accepting federal student loans and grants; Grand Canyon University was fined $37.7 million. These were the real villains, Madaio thought. But that was changing.

Christopher Madaio So it became clear to me that their priorities were not to continue with fraud or enforcement or stopping students from being harmed in that regard. Instead, it really appeared that the focus was going to be on schools’ use of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and focusing all their enforcement effort on that. So all of those things made me very concerned for what space there would be for enforcement of misrepresentations and lies and fraud to students and how students would be protected.

Jack Stripling Madaio had reason to be concerned about his future in the department. What was happening under Trump wasn’t just about efficiency, he said. It was about politics. And Madaio was a political target. A conservative group called the American Accountability Foundation put Madaio on its Department of Education Watchlist, a repository of federal employees whom the foundation has labeled as members of the liberal deep state. Madaio landed on the list in part because he had donated about $120 to Democratic candidates, including Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. None of this affected how he did his job, Madaio said. But he had reason to think it was enough to get him fired under Trump. Rather than wait for that to happen, Madaio resigned effective February 7, and he’s taken a new position as a senior adviser at The Institute for College Access and Success. Now, Madaio says, he’s worried about the federal government’s capacity for oversight of predatory colleges.

Christopher Madaio You know that’s where I fear that schools are going to once again start using these high pressure predatory recruitment tactics that we saw 10 or so years ago that we really tried to — we at the department when I was there — tried to deter and prevent and stop and show that there was a cop on the beat. Schools may once again start misrepresenting how many graduates get jobs and inflating the money their graduates can make and inaccurately stating how much their school costs. So I just think that’s where it’s gonna be up to those states to do more if the department staff, both on the oversight team, and the enforcement team has just been so dramatically reduced.

Jack Stripling When Madaio left the department in February, the major purge was still yet to come. That wouldn’t happen until March 11. It’s a day department employees have come to describe as Bloody Tuesday.

Elizabeth Morrow Yeah, March 11th, you know it started normally. Like we were just doing our work, going along. I don’t think there was much of a discussion of... there wasn’t. I mean, I have no recollection of anything, any sort of premonition that something was coming or news.

Jack Stripling: That’s Elizabeth Morrow. She’s a lawyer who worked as a deputy director of the Office of Public Engagement for Non-Discrimination. It’s part of the Office for Civil Rights, which is the branch of the education department charged with enforcing civil rights laws. If someone sent an email to ocr@ed.gov, chances are Morrow or someone on her team saw it. That email is often the first point of contact between the federal government and a person on a college campus who has experienced sexual harassment, assault, or discrimination based on race, religion, disability, or other protected statuses.

Elizabeth Morrow And then I think it started with the email in the afternoon that said, the office is going to be closed tomorrow, so on the 12th. And I believe the email said for security reasons. So we weren’t immediately suspect because, you know, there had been various protests in and around DC. We’re not that far from the Capitol. So we thought maybe someone is doing a big protest and maybe our exits will be blocked or whatever the case may be. That was my first thought. I believe the email said, take your laptops with you. So it was like, okay, so they expect us to work from home tomorrow. OK. So I talked to my team, made sure everybody had seen it, because I had people that were spread out throughout the country, different offices and such. So then I got into the elevator that afternoon to take the train home. And I ran into a woman I did not know. And she looked at me and she said, ‘We’re all gonna get fired.’ And I was like, I stopped for a minute. I said, oh, maybe I should go back to my office and clean my belongings out if we’re not coming back. I said, but the email said work will resume as normal on the 13th. So, I didn’t… I kept going, got on the train, went home. And then I can’t recall, I think the email came in later that night about the RIF that was coming.”

Jack Stripling “RIF” is shorthand for Reduction in Force. In Washington, a town that loves acronyms, its meaning is widely understood. It’s even become a verb for people like Morrow, who “Got Riffed” on March 11. In our conversation, she walked me through that memorable day — a day that upended her life, and the lives of some 1,300 other education department employees. And she told me what these mass dismissals might mean for college students and parents across the country.

Elizabeth Morrow So on Bloody Tuesday, access to the OCR mailbox was cut off. And then I think by Thursday, we discovered that we could no longer send emails externally. So you could send an email to anybody with an ed.gov email address, but I tried to send things to myself, to my personal email, and they were blocked.

Jack Stripling How did you officially learn that you were out of a job?

Elizabeth Morrow It was the email from, I believe it was Jacqueline Clay, who was our CHCO (Chief Human Capital Officer), saying, unfortunately, you are one of the people included in this RIF.

Jack Stripling What was your reaction to that?

Elizabeth Morrow I don’t really think I was surprised because I would have been surprised I think if we hadn’t been included. Because we didn’t control messaging but at the same time, you know, we had a lot of interactions with the public. And if you want to control the narrative, you’re going to take over that very important instrument immediately.

Jack Stripling What was the narrative you think they were trying to put out into the world?

Elizabeth Morrow The Department of Education, it’ll be fine in its new form. It’ll be fine as a much smaller agency. This is the narrative about the entire federal government, right? It’s bloated. There’s too many people. We’re lazy. We don’t do any work. You know? We sit around and I’m not sure what we’re supposed to be doing, but I’ve never worked with a more dedicated group of people. It makes you so angry, you know? And I think controlling the narrative is hugely, hugely important for this administration. Although, you know, each day that goes by, it kind of seems like they really don’t care what people think, and they certainly don’t care about education because, you know, when you cut off grant funding, and people’s access to information — basic information: Have I been discriminated against. Do I have a right to file a complaint? Is my child going to get the services that they’re entitled to? You know, you’re left with, you know, the takeaway is, it doesn’t matter. We’ll all be fine. We’ll be fine with this much, you know, pared down federal government.

Jack Stripling We talked about the fact that you are, in many ways, the first point of contact for somebody who’s encountered a problem on their campus. Maybe they’re being harassed by a professor. Maybe they’ve been discriminated against because of a disability. Are there particularly vulnerable populations that you’re most worried about because of these cuts?

Elizabeth Morrow Absolutely. And I would say first: parents of children with disabilities, especially severe disabilities. We would get hundreds of emails per week, sometimes more.

Jack Stripling Are you worried about students with disabilities who are in college?

Elizabeth Morrow Absolutely. There are a lot of university college students who are accustomed to having accommodations and perhaps they’ve had accommodations for years. And now you kind of flip the switch. They enter this new arena and they have to advocate for themselves probably for the first time because they’ve always had an advocate prior to that. They’ve had a parent, a grandparent or an actual advocate who argued and provided the medical documentation and did what they needed. Now, this adult has to go to the disability services office, student services or whatever the university calls it and say, hey, I’m an individual with a disability, I need accommodations and then take it from there and...

Jack Stripling But connect the dots for me, Elizabeth. What are you truly worried about? That somebody sends an email to OCR and there’s nobody to answer it?

Elizabeth Morrow That’s a huge concern. And that is happening. I’m absolutely sure that that’s happening. The emails pile up very quickly if there isn’t someone there to monitor and sort of be the traffic cop and get them to the right place, get them to a regional office, you know, so that they can handle the complaint from that point on. Or get them, it might just be an answer to a question. It may not even be, well, I’m not ready to file a complaint yet. I just wanted to know what my rights are. So these adults, these young men and women, they may give up. You know, if you can give them some kind of answer, like, yes, absolutely, you can file a complaint. Or yes just go to your student services office and ask to be accommodated; Some basic level of information that, you know, depending upon the nature of their disability, they may be terrified to go into that office. They may have a history of, you know, having to fight and not get what they need. So whenever you don’t have an outlet for giving people information, I think there’s always that potential for, okay, I’m just not going to bother, and then they fail, where they could succeed if they were given a basic accommodation.

Jack Stripling And this isn’t just the DC office, right? I mean, you worked in the headquarters in the LBJ Building, but there were a dozen regional Office for Civil Rights outposts. I think they’re now reportedly down to five. They’re closing locations in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, some other places.

Elizabeth Morrow New York, Philly.

Jack Stripling Right. What’s the larger effect of that?

Elizabeth Morrow It’s pretty catastrophic. I mean, we had 12. I don’t know why I’m getting emotional. I apologize. We had 12 regional offices. They closed seven. So as you said, there are five left standing. And the attorneys who are staffing those offices and the rest of the staff who are still there have seen their caseloads more than triple. So, an attorney before this happened might have 30 to 40 cases on average that they were handling at one time, and now it’s more than 150. And that’s just not something that can be sustained over the long term. These people are going to be exhausted and probably will leave because it’s such an overload.

Jack Stripling We’re talking mostly about how this will affect other people, and I think that’s appropriate in this type of conversation. But I am curious, Elizabeth, how this is affecting you.

Elizabeth Morrow Well, I will say this, I’m hitting a milestone birthday this month. I won’t say which one, but I’m hitting a milestone. And, in less than a decade, we’ll just say that, I probably would have retired. Now, because of the length of time I was with Ed, by the time I am separated from OCR on June 9th, I will be less than two months from having my pension vest. So I have to walk away from that because I didn’t get to five years. On top of that, I have a daughter with cancer. So, you know. Sorry, just give me a second.

Jack Stripling Sure.

Elizabeth Morrow The silver lining is I can spend more time with her and can perhaps go to chemo with her more. But I have to be able to support myself. I’ve been a single parent. My children are adults now, but I’ve be a single parents for them for a long time. So you think about the situation may be flipped on its head and my children may be supporting me. Now I’m an attorney, I can practice, I can go and find another job. But there are tens of thousands of people looking for jobs. And so the market is saturated. You know and especially, I can’t ignore the fact that I am older and that I’m nearing the end of my working life. And so it’s going to be more difficult probably for me to find a job, perhaps, than some of my colleagues who were laid off. You can’t let the fear sort of immobilize you. You have to keep moving forward. I’ve always been that way. I’ve been resilient and determined and I am still that person. But I am fearful that it may be really, really difficult to find another job in this environment, under this administration. And I would stay in the federal government if I could, but that’s fairly out of reach, I think, at the moment. So, I’ll just keep moving forward and I remain hopeful. But I do, I do really wonder what the next chapter is going to look like. I think about that every day when I wake up: what’s in store today?

Jack Stripling On March 14, days after the mass dismissals at the department, protesters gathered outside its Washington headquarters at the Lyndon B. Johnson Building. Speakers described the layoffs as detrimental to education, and some trained their ire on Linda McMahon, the U.S. Secretary of Education.

PROTEST SOUND Education is a right. Education is a right. That is why we have to fight. That is why we have to fight. Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Linda McMahon has got to go! Linda McMahon has got to go! Hey hey! Ho ho!

Jack Stripling Days after the protest, President Trump signed an executive order calling on Sec. McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” — a move that will require an act of Congress. The order stipulates that the secretary should ensure the quote “uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

PROTEST SOUND I’m looking at this building, and I see empty windows. I see empty windows with people who should be at their desks, helping students achieve their full potential. Dedicated public servants! These cuts, this isn’t just about a department and a building. This is about federal streams of money that help students live into their full potential.

Jack Stripling We provided the Department of Education with an opportunity to respond to this episode, specifically the employees’ concerns that the department will struggle to carry out its vital functions in the wake of recent layoffs. A spokesperson said in an email that the department had quote “reaffirmed its commitment to meeting and continuing all statutory functions.”

In response to questions about cuts to the department’s data gathering arm, a spokesperson criticized the Institute of Education Sciences, which houses the National Center for Education Statistics. The spokesperson wrote, “Despite spending hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds annually, IES has failed to effectively fulfill its mandate to identify best practices and new approaches that improve educational outcomes and close achievement gaps for students.” end quote.

The spokesperson said the department is evaluating how to restructure IES.

Special thanks to Michael Theis, our photo and media editor at The Chronicle, who provided additional audio for this episode.

College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com.

We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our Chronicle producer is Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez. Our podcast artwork is by Kattrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.