President Donald Trump is stripping two of the Education Department’s core functions — special education oversight and civil rights enforcement — and handing them to other federal agencies, according to a report published Monday, June 16.
Special education programs would move to the Department of Health and Human Services. Civil rights enforcement would shift to the Justice Department.
Both moves push Trump closer to his stated goal of shutting the Education Department down entirely. He’s said publicly he wants to close the agency — these transfers would hollow it out without requiring an act of Congress to formally abolish it.
The civil rights office within the Education Department currently handles complaints of discrimination in schools, including cases involving race, sex, and disability. Moving it to the Justice Department would place that work under an agency with a broader law-enforcement mandate and a different chain of command. What that means for pending complaints or open investigations isn’t yet clear.
Special education oversight, meanwhile, falls under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — a federal law that requires schools to provide services to students with disabilities. The Education Department has historically administered that law and distributed the federal funding tied to it. Shifting that responsibility to HHS would be one of the more significant structural changes to how those services are funded and monitored at the federal level.
Neither the White House nor HHS had announced a timeline for when the transfers would take effect, according to NPR’s report. It’s also not clear whether Congress, which controls appropriations, would need to sign off on moving the money that funds those programs.
Reported by NPR. Read the original report.
