Administration Moves Special Education to HHS and School Civil-Rights Enforcement to DOJ, Its Most Aggressive Step Yet Toward Dismantling the Education Department

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On June 16, 2026, the Department of Education announced that it was handing off two of its most consequential remaining functions: programs for students with disabilities go to the Department of Health and Human Services, and enforcement of civil-rights law in schools goes to the Department of Justice. The New York Times called it "the most aggressive moves yet by the White House to dismantle an agency it has pledged to dissolve." Neither transfer was authorized by a new act of Congress. Both were executed through "interagency agreements"—contract-like arrangements between federal agencies that, as the Times noted, "have generally been used to purchase supplies or lease space," not to relocate the statutory missions of a cabinet department.

The announcement is best understood as the culmination of a project that began in the administration's first weeks and has proceeded in deliberate stages: an executive order, mass layoffs, a favorable Supreme Court intervention, and then a rolling series of agreements that have moved tens of billions of dollars in programs out of the department while its formal shell remains standing.

The Road Here: An Executive Order, Mass Layoffs, and a Supreme Court Stay

In March 2025, the department announced a reduction in force affecting nearly 1,400 employees which, combined with buyouts, cut the agency's workforce roughly in half. Days later, on March 20, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14242, "Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities," directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education" while "ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely." The order called federal control of education a failed "experiment" and said the department's "main functions can, and should, be returned to the States." Its operative command was hedged—McMahon was to act "to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law"—an acknowledgment that only Congress can abolish the department it created in 1979.

The next day, Trump announced from the Oval Office that the federal student loan portfolio would move to the Small Business Administration and that "special needs" and nutrition programs would go to HHS. Notably, the SBA plan never materialized in the agreements that followed; the transfers that were eventually executed spread programs across Labor, HHS, Interior, State, Justice, and Treasury instead, with student aid still administered through the department as the later agreements were announced.

A coalition of Democratic-led states, school districts, and unions sued, and on May 22, 2025, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun enjoined the layoffs and ordered fired employees reinstated, finding the RIF was in service of an unlawful de facto dismantling. On July 14, 2025, the Supreme Court stayed that injunction in McMahon v. New York, an unsigned emergency order with no reasoning, allowing the roughly 1,378 layoffs to proceed while litigation continued. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, dissented in 19 pages, calling the decision "indefensible" and warning that it "hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out." The stay did not decide the legality of the dismantling—the underlying case remains alive—but it removed the practical obstacle, and the administration moved quickly to complete the staffing cuts. Conservative legal advocates celebrated the order as vindication of the president's authority to manage the executive branch; disability groups like The Arc warned it put students with disabilities "in harm's way."

The Interagency-Agreement Strategy

With the workforce halved, the administration turned to moving the programs themselves. In 2025 the department transferred day-to-day administration of roughly $2.6 billion in career, technical, and adult education programs to the Labor Department; then, on November 18, 2025, it announced six new "agency partnerships" explicitly framed as "breaking up the federal education bureaucracy." Under those agreements, Labor took over management of most K-12 grant programs—including the $28 billion Office of Elementary and Secondary Education portfolio and about $3 billion in higher-education grants; Interior took the Office of Indian Education; State took Fulbright-Hays and international education programs; and HHS took child-care access and foreign medical accreditation functions. McMahon called cutting "layers of red tape in Washington" an "essential piece of our final mission" to "return education to the states." By June 2026, 14 interagency agreements had scattered more than 100 programs across six agencies.

The legal theory is untested at this scale. The Congressional Research Service analyzed the agreements' novel use, and critics across the education establishment—from the Center for American Progress to The Institute for College Access & Success—argue that statutes vest these functions in the Secretary of Education specifically, that Congress appropriated the money to the Education Department, and that "outsourcing" entire offices is dismantling by another name. The department's position is that it retains ultimate statutory responsibility and oversight while partner agencies handle administration—a structure McMahon has described as a set of test cases demonstrating that the department is redundant.

The June 16 Moves: Special Education to HHS, Civil Rights to Justice

The June 16 agreements reached the department's most sensitive remaining work. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) oversees more than $15 billion a year in funding for students with disabilities and enforces state compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the law guaranteeing disabled children a free appropriate public education. Its functions move to HHS—specifically, per the Times' reporting, into the Administration on Disabilities, led by Rebecca Hines, a sister-in-law of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy, who had previously said HHS was "fully prepared" to take on the office, said the changes "will improve education and employment outcomes, uphold the rights of individuals with disabilities and help every child reach their full potential." Critics noted that Kennedy has alienated disability advocates by promoting the discredited claim that vaccines may cause autism.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR)—a roughly $140 million office that for decades has investigated discrimination complaints in schools on the basis of race, sex, and disability—will now refer all complaints to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the arrangement would "build a stronger, more coordinated civil rights enforcement system," and the day after the announcement DOJ said it would investigate the Education Department's civil-rights cases. The context makes the handoff contentious: as of January 2025 OCR had a backlog of roughly 12,000 unresolved cases—nearly half involving disability-based discrimination—and the RIFs had already closed regional OCR offices and gutted its staff. The receiving agency has its own capacity problem: the Justice Department has lost more than 20 percent of the nearly 13,000 lawyers it employed at the start of the second Trump administration. And the move sits awkwardly with McMahon's own testimony: facing bipartisan concern about the backlog, she had told lawmakers in May 2026 that she wanted to hire more civil-rights lawyers at the Education Department, even as the White House proposed cutting OCR's budget to $49 million.

There is also a structural critique specific to the pairing. The largest share of school discrimination complaints in recent years has been filed on behalf of disabled students; the June agreements send those students' services to one agency and the enforcement of their rights to another. Advocates argue this decoupling is precisely what a dedicated education department existed to avoid.

The Administration's Case

The administration's argument, made consistently since the executive order, has several strands. First, federalism: education is constitutionally and traditionally a state and local function—curriculum, hiring, and standards already rest with states and districts—and the department, created in 1979 as what critics call a payoff to the National Education Association, added a bureaucratic layer without improving results. Administration officials point to decades of flat or declining national test scores despite trillions in cumulative federal spending, and to the talking point that the department "has never educated a single child"—it writes checks and enforces rules rather than running schools. Second, efficiency and fit: McMahon says the agreements "align federal responsibilities with the agencies best positioned to support them"—Labor already runs workforce grants, HHS already runs Head Start, Medicaid, and disability services through its Administration for Community Living, and DOJ is the government's civil-rights litigator; supporters argue placing special education at HHS could better coordinate educational services with the health and early-childhood programs disabled children already use. Third, continuity: department officials insist that students, parents, and educators "would not experience any change in services," that no statute is being repealed, that formula dollars will flow on schedule, and that the department retains statutory responsibility and oversight under each agreement. In a late-June briefing addressing what it called misconceptions, OSERS acting assistant secretary Kelly Rogers emphasized that IDEA rights "will continue to remain... at the local level" and that fiscal 2026 special-education grants would still be coordinated by the Education Department.

The strongest good-faith version of the case is that this is a reversible administrative experiment: Congress keeps the money flowing, the statutes remain in force, and if consolidated administration at Labor or HHS genuinely reduces duplication, Congress could later ratify the arrangement—much as federal education programs lived inside the Department of Health, Education and Welfare before 1979 without ceasing to function.

Civil-Rights and Disability Concerns

The opposition is broad and, on the disability side, nearly unanimous among advocacy organizations. By late June, more than 700 disability, civil-rights, and education groups had signed a letter urging Congress to halt the transfers. The ACLU condemned the dismantling of the department's "core civil rights and education offices." Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, which represents about 2,000 current and former department employees, said the moves "will leave our most vulnerable students and families who have been shut out of our education system without the services they need and without protection when they face discrimination. This isn't efficiency; it's chaos." Keri Rodrigues of the National Parents Union argued that "moving special education to Health and Human Services risks treating disabilities as medical conditions rather than protecting students' legal right to a free and appropriate public education," while "shifting civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department turns parents seeking support into potential litigants." Katy Neas, chief executive of The Arc, said a student denied services "needs one federal education system that can see the whole picture and act," rather than "chasing answers across the federal government."

The substantive worries are specific. OCR's administrative complaint process was designed to be free and accessible—a parent can file without a lawyer, and investigations can produce systemic fixes; DOJ, by contrast, is a litigating agency that takes a small number of cases to court, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities warned that the shift could deter families—especially in marginalized communities—from filing at all. On the services side, former officials and groups like the Council for Exceptional Children question whether IDEA compliance can be maintained without education-focused leadership, and note that earlier transfers have already produced implementation delays—delays significant enough that K-12 formula funds due in July 2026 were routed through the Education Department's existing systems rather than Labor's, according to Education Week. Department employees themselves reported receiving little information about whether they would move with their programs.

Legal and Congressional Pushback

Formally abolishing the department requires an act of Congress, and no such bill has moved; since 1980, proposals to eliminate the agency have repeatedly failed even under unified Republican control. That gap between the pledge and the law is what makes the interagency agreements legally vulnerable. Plaintiffs in the ongoing litigation brought by Democratic attorneys general—the same case that produced the 2025 injunction and Supreme Court stay—amended their complaints to argue the agreements are illegal overreach, and the June 16 moves were expected to be challenged immediately. Disability organizations, including the American Association of People with Disabilities, called the transfers flatly unlawful.

Appropriations law supplies a second front. In February 2026, Congress appropriated more than $15 billion for special education and level-funded OCR at $140 million—explicitly rejecting the administration's proposed cut to $49 million—and it appropriated that money to the Education Department. Bipartisan budget language questioned the legality and value of the transfers, raising the question whether spending Education Department appropriations through other agencies defies congressional intent, an echo of the Impoundment Control Act fights running through this administration.

The most notable development is Republican. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, chairman of the Senate education committee and a longtime supporter of closing the department, opposes the special-education move to HHS—he has said Labor would be a more sensible home—and committed to holding a vote on legislation, introduced by Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, to block the transfer. It is the first formal Republican legislative opposition to any piece of the dismantling, and a committee vote was expected in July 2026. In the House, Representative Mark DeSaulnier introduced an amendment to bar the transfers. None of these measures had become law as of July 11, 2026.

What Is and Isn't Established

It is established that the administration has moved, or is moving, the administration of most of the Education Department's major functions—K-12 grants, higher-education grants, career and technical education, Indian education, international programs, special education, and civil-rights enforcement—into six other agencies through mechanisms never before used for this purpose, after halving the department's staff, and that it has done so in explicit service of a stated goal of closing the department that it lacks the legal authority to accomplish alone. It is established that Congress has continued to fund the programs at the Education Department, and that the Supreme Court has allowed the layoffs to proceed without ruling on the lawfulness of the broader dismantling.

What is not established is the consequence. The administration's assurance that families will notice no change is a prediction, not a record; the critics' warning of collapsed enforcement and lost services is likewise, at this stage, a forecast—though one informed by the documented OCR backlog, the staffing losses at both the sending and receiving agencies, and the funding delays that followed the earlier transfers. Also unresolved is the central legal question: whether an administration may lawfully hollow out a statutory agency it cannot abolish. That question is now squarely presented in the amended litigation and in Congress, where the Cassidy-Kaine vote will test whether the first crack in Republican support widens. However those contests end, the June 16 agreements mark the moment the dismantling of the Department of Education moved from rhetoric and staffing cuts to the reassignment of its core missions—including, for the first time since 1980, taking the federal enforcement of schoolchildren's civil rights out of the hands of an education agency.