WASHINGTON (AP) — The Education Department is handing off two of its most important functions, giving oversight of special education and civil rights to other agencies. With the latest moves, the department will have offloaded the vast majority of its duties.
Dissolving the department entirely requires an act of Congress. Still, the latest developments bring the administration significantly closer to fulfilling President Donald Trump's pledge to shut
down the Education Department, which he says will give education “back to the states.”
The administration is framing Tuesday's moves as a partnership between federal agencies intended to reduce bureaucracy. The Justice Department will handle civil rights enforcement in schools, and the Department of Health and Human Services will oversee special education. The Justice Department will also manage work involving student privacy protections.
When parents believe their child is facing discrimination at school, and when local officials fail to fix it, families often turn to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights as a last resort. The office investigates complaints filed by students, parents and advocacy groups alleging civil rights violations at schools, colleges and universities that get federal money. It also occasionally will initiate an investigation on its own.
Based on an investigator’s findings, the department may force the school to fix the problem. Schools that refuse risk losing federal money.
The office investigates a wide range of complaints, including allegations of discrimination based on race, sex, religion and disability status. As examples, a complaint may point to unequal treatment of girls and boys in sports, or it may claim a school mishandled sexual assault allegations. It might say a school is disciplining students of one race more harshly than another.
The Trump administration has used the Office for Civil Rights for its own purposes, forcing schools to comply with its views on diversity, equity and inclusion. Some schools and colleges have closed DEI offices and abandoned efforts to close achievement gaps between white students and their Black and Latino peers. The Office for Civil Rights also has enforced the administration's efforts to push transgender athletes out of sports.
For special education, the Education Department indirectly plays a critical role in the lives of students with disabilities, distributing billions of dollars to schools.
The department's special education office ensures states comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees access to education for disabled students. It also supports special vocational programs and career counseling for young people with disabilities. The office once employed around 200 people and now employs about 121.
Trump campaigned on dismantling the department. Last March, shortly after the confirmation of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the administration enacted major reductions in the Education Department workforce, cutting its staff roughly in half.
The Education Department has since been handing off various operations, including massive grant programs, through a series of interagency agreements.
Work that’s already been reassigned includes Title I funding for schools serving low-income communities, as well as smaller funding pools for teacher training, English instruction and a college-access program known as TRIO. These programs are now at the Labor Department.
The federal student loan portfolio is being handed over to the Treasury Department in phases. And the Department of Health and Human Services took grant programs related to safety, community engagement and parents attending college, plus foreign medical school accreditation.
Foreign language programs and a portal that tracks foreign gifts to universities have gone to the State Department. And the Interior Department is now overseeing Native American education.
Many of the program transfers have at least nominally kept the Education Department in charge of oversight and policy while moving everyday operations to the other agencies. The department’s biggest functions are effectively now reassigned, and what remains is a skeleton of what it once was.
Functions still at the department include the agency’s research arms, though they’ve been heavily downsized. The Institute of Education Sciences evaluates and collects statistics, and the National Center for Education Statistics administers the Nation’s Report Card and other federal tests.
The Office of the Education Secretary remains intact, including her staff who’ve been executing agreements with other agencies. The department is working to approve requests for waivers that give states more flexibility for spending federal money. Finally, legal oversight of major grants remains with the department, even though day-to-day operations have been transferred to other agencies.
A Trump administration fact sheet promises: “This partnership will not impact students, parents or families who believe they have experienced discrimination. Anyone who believes discrimination has occurred in an education program or activity may file a complaint with ED-OCR” — the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights.
However, advocates worry the movement of key functions to other agencies will complicate the process for enforcing disability and civil rights. Currently, for example, if a student with a disability is denied school accommodations, her parents can often appeal to a single federal agency — the Education Department — to handle the violation. Now, parents might have to navigate multiple bureaucratic systems to get answers.
With special education work transferred to Health and Human Services, students with disabilities could be viewed through a medical lens and not in terms of their educational needs, advocates said.
In a medical model, “disability is treated as a diagnosis to manage instead of a natural part of human life," said Robyn Linscott, who directs education policy at The Arc of the United States, a major disability rights group. "When that mindset drives education decisions, students are more likely to be segregated, underestimated or treated as separate from the school community.”
It's possible a group might file a lawsuit or amend existing lawsuits to stop these changes, at least temporarily.
It's also unclear what will happen with staff at the Office for Civil Rights or those who oversee special education. If any remain, how exactly will responsibilities be divided, especially between the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights and the Justice Department? Who will handle existing cases?
The office has had quite the case backlog, which started before Trump took office but has grown during his presidency. In April, a report from Sen. Bernie Sanders found the Office for Civil Rights had reached zero resolution agreements since March 2025 over sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion and restraint, racial harassment or discriminatory school discipline. The report from Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, also found more than 2,700 pending cases in those categories.
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AP Education Writer Annie Ma contributed from Washington. _____
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