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Officials with the Education Department told employees in the civil rights office Tuesday that Elon Musk 's cost-cutting team was scrutinizing the department's operations, which could lead to further staff reductions. Budget with ET Tax calculator In an all-hands call with the employees in the department's Office of Civil Rights on Tuesday, Craig Trainor, the office's acting assistant secretary, signalled that the moves were part of a broader effort by Musk, the world's richest man, to reshape the federal government. "You probably know that DOGE -- the DOGE team -- is, like the other federal departments, is here working on President Trump's promise to the American people to reform the federal bureaucracy, so we're going to increase efficiencies in OCR and Ed generally," Trainor said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times, referring to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The Musk team's presence at the Education Department is the latest sign of the billionaire's expanding government influence, which already stretches into more than half a dozen agencies. His allies have gained access to closely held financial and data systems and helped rapidly dismantle the U.S.
Agency for International Development in the last week. Tuesday's meeting at the Education Department came after other efforts by Trump appointees to realign the agency with the president's goals, through which at least 60 employees affiliated with diversity and equity efforts were placed on paid leave indefinitely, according to their union. Among those placed on leave were several dozen people who took part in a routine diversity workshop that had been offered regularly for a decade.
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" In a statement Monday, Biedermann said the department was "evaluating staffing" in line with "putting student outcomes above special interests." Within the civil rights office, staff were bereft, according to two people who attended the meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Even though the group had anticipated the changes, one person said, hearing them laid out in such stark detail was upsetting.
Trainor also cautioned staff members "not to believe everything you read and everything you hear about how the process will shake out," and encouraged them to seek answers from their supervisors. In the past week, staff members who had recently been hired were told to expect to lose their jobs, according to several people across the department. The civil rights office has the mandate of investigating violations of a variety of civil rights laws in schools that receive federal funding.
But Trainor told employees that they would now be expected to prioritize antisemitism cases, following a directive from Trump in an executive order he signed last week. "We're also going to use our scarce resources to maximum effect in the service of the president's priorities," he said, according to the recording. Trainor also told the office's staff, which helped pursue more than 140 investigations involving accusations of antisemitism or other discrimination based on shared ancestry last year, that the office had failed under his predecessors' leadership, resolving too few cases.
"To say the last administration was both negligent and feckless on this front would be charitable to the point of dishonesty," he said. In 2024, the office received more than 22,500 complaints of civil rights violations, a single-year record, and resolved a number of the fraught cases opened after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, which set off protests on campuses across the country.
But at the end of former President Joe Biden 's tenure, dozens of cases involving charges of antisemitism, anti-Arab or anti-Muslim discrimination remained open. It was not clear how the civil rights office would handle its caseload in other areas, especially while facing the possibility of reductions to its staff. The office is also legally obligated to investigate a variety of other civil rights violations, including harassment or discrimination based on race, sex and age.
And at the same time employees were being told to refocus Tuesday, the department sent out a "Dear colleague" letter restating its new interpretation of Title IX -- the set of regulations covering sexual misconduct and harassment that the office enforces -- which the Trump administration narrowed significantly in January. "We're going to trust you to use your judgment to dismiss cases expeditiously, consistent with the law and the administration's priorities," Trainor said..
