What Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett and her colleagues have done in Texas, challenging the Department of Education to reverse its decision to close the Regional Office of Civil Rights (OCR) should be emulated across the nation.
In the letter, Rep. Crockett and the other Democratic members of Congress wrote: “As you are aware, OCR plays a vital role in ensuring students have access to quality education by enforcing federal civil rights protections throughout our country’s education system. Such protections include ensuring students with disabilities receive meaningful access to their programs or activities in the most integrated, appropriate education settings; that students and faculty are protected against sexual discrimination in the classroom and in school programming and activities; and ensuring that no student is discriminated against by schools because of their race, religion, national origin, or color.”
What the Texans have done coincides with the lawsuit filed by Democratic-led states, including New York Attorney General Letitia James. Under the leadership of Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the department announced that it was cutting its workforce nearly in half, from 4,133 to 2,183 employees, an evisceration by “a thousand cuts,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Echoing James and Weingarten was a legal complaint filed last week in Massachusetts federal court that the Trump administration “cannot dismantle the Department of Education. It cannot override — whether through large-scale RIFs (Reduction in Force) or otherwise — the statutory framework prescribing the Department’s responsibilities.” In short, what the lawsuit notes emphatically is that the department cannot be incapacitated without congressional approval.
Like many of the other moves to eliminate various departments and agencies of the federal government, the Trump administration, aided and abetted by DOGE, justifies the changes under so-called efficiency and accountability, which comes with no real evidence of the lack of either.
From coast to coast, there’s a growing resentment towards Trump’s policies, and nowhere are they more deleterious than in the educational realm. Demolishing the Department of Education is only a harbinger, we feel, of more destruction on the agenda, and if education is stifled, then what safeguards exist to protect other valuable agencies and institutions? We have already seen the attempted muzzling of the press and the media. An authoritarian juggernaut looms on the horizon.
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