A school bus stops at an intersection in south Minneapolis in January 2025. (Ellen Schmidt/Minnesota Reformer)
WASHINGTON – Former U.S. Education Department officials in Republican and Democratic administrations sounded the alarm Monday about the agency’s efforts to outsource its special education programs and civil rights enforcement to other agencies.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state called the former officials along with advocates and educators to a virtual news conference to condemn the sweeping moves, part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to dismantle the 46-year-old Education Department.
Murray rebuked that Transfers as “outrageous” and “totally unacceptable,” noting that while she will “fight tooth and nail” against any attempt to dismantle the agency, she is “particularly concerned about what this could mean for all students, especially students with disabilities.”
The agency said in June that the Department of Health and Human Services would administer the programs under the Education Department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), while civil rights enforcement would be assigned to the Justice Department under the Office for Civil Rights.
The Ministry of Education announced this 10 earlier Interagency agreements or IAAs with HHS, Labor, Interior, State and Ministry of Financewhich transfer several educational responsibilities to these agencies.
The department has stated that it “will continue to carry out all duties and responsibilities required by law” regarding special education programs and civil rights enforcement.
OSERS is responsible for administering the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which guarantees free public education for students with disabilities. The OSERS umbrella entity includes the Office of the Assistant Secretary, the Office of Special Education Programs, and the Rehabilitation Services Administration.
The Civil Rights Office is tasked with investigating complaints from students and families.
“Learners, not patients”
Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc of the United States, an advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said the transfers would “split the departments responsible for implementing disability rights in schools, leaving families looking for answers across the federal government rather than being held accountable by a single education agency.”
Neas served as deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary at OSERS during the Biden administration.
“The stakes have never been higher,” she said. “If we allow the Department of Education to be dismantled, we not only undo decades of progress, but we also risk abandoning the promise that every child deserves a chance to try and succeed.”
Catherine Lhamon, executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said the “new interagency agreement between the Department of Education and the Department of Justice is what someone would create if that person would make a system fail.”
Lhamon served as deputy secretary for civil rights during the Obama and Biden administrations.
“The main harm of this new agreement is that it ensures that the federal government will longer remain silent about the classic types of discrimination cases that families face,” Lhamon said. Examples of this include restraint or isolation of students, she said.
It raises “the core question of whether students with disabilities have the free, appropriate public education to which they are legally entitled,” Lhamon added.
Stephanie Smith Lee, co-director of policy and advocacy at the National Down Syndrome Congress, pointed out that “IDEA is an education and civil rights law, not a health care program.”
“Students with disabilities are learners, not patients,” added Lee, who served as director of the Office of Special Education Programs during the George W. Bush administration.
“Shifting special education and vocational rehabilitation into the Department of Health and Human Services would separate it from the rest of federal education policy and weaken the expertise and coordinated oversight that students, families and states rely on,” she said.
Savannah Newhouse, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, dismissed the criticism, saying in a statement to States Newsroom that Murray and the former officials were part of a failing status quo.
“As Senator Murray well knows, the Department of Education’s interagency partnerships do not change the Trump Administration’s commitment to students with disabilities and federal civil rights laws,” she wrote. “These agreements simply ensure that well-positioned agencies can manage the workload, pool their expertise and ultimately strengthen protections for students.”
US House bills are “dead” in the Senate.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of July House Committee on Education and the Workforce introduced a package of 10 bills that would permanently transfer several functions of education to other departments and broadly mirror many of the previous IAAs.
In particular, this package does not include efforts to transfer the education system’s responsibilities regarding special education programs and civil rights enforcement to other agencies.
“As long as that former preschool teacher is a U.S. senator, any of these bills are dead immediately,” Murray said.
